Although it is said that she resents it
Although it is said that she resents it.She may look forward to the day when the daily scrutiny is less intense. “On 2 August this year we will have been in power for longer than that Attlee government,” he told the Fabian Society. By the time the actual date arrived, however, any such grandstanding had been swept aside by the suicide of David Kelly.Subsequent milestones, namely those marked John Major (overtaken last October), Harold Macmillan (8 February this year) and Ramsay MacDonald (17 February) were passed with rather less fanfare.But if Blair had a date in mind, which he probably does not, he would not tell anyone except possibly Cherie, Jonathan Powell, his chief of staff, and Sally Morgan, his political adviser. Before the second 1974 election, Wilson told Denis Healey, Tony Benn and Joe Haines, his press secretary, he would go after two years.
If Blair did the same, power would drain away from him and to Gordon Brown instantly. That is why Brown can only ever receive undated assurances of Blair’s willingness to ease his succession. Those close to both Blair and Brown say that these cloudy promises were renewed at the so-called Granita II dinner at John Prescott’s Admiralty Arch apartment last November. But no one should assume that Brown’s cheerful demeanour since then means a date has been set.Blair is said to have given some thought to when and how he might move on, and has even said to some interviewers that he has thought about what he might move on to. For the benefit of those not watching Newsnight, he repeated it in an interview with The Observer in September last year He even allowed himself to be drawn on a follow-up question.
In that obsession with historical dates, at least, Blair is like many of his predecessors. Last year, he unwisely anticipated the date on which he would overtake Clement Attlee in length of prime ministerial service. He even mentioned a possible date, 14 June 1973, because then he would have served longer than Asquith, then – until Thatcher – the longest-serving prime minister of the century. “Does he ever look around the cabinet table and ask himself whether someone else might just conceivably do the job better? He laughs: ‘No.’”The rules of the media game have changed since Harold Wilson’s shock resignation in 1976. He knows that the only way he will be ejected from office against his will is if, as in her case, a clear majority of his MPs demand it And he is nowhere near that situation yet.
He may not be the shining electoral asset to his party that he once was, but he is not yet the liability that she had become a year or 18 months before her fall.Hence all the speculation of the past week about how long he might continue as Prime Minister turns quite rightly on how long he wants to And that is unknowable. In fact, he had told Roy Jenkins before the 1970 election that, if he won it, he would stand down during that term. As the late and sadly missed Ben Pimlott wrote in his great biography, Wilson dropped hints “to anybody who would listen” for three months before he went – including, famously, to James Callaghan in the No 10 lavatory just before the cabinet meeting at which he made his announcement. But, as the political editor noted in the 15th paragraph of the report, that is merely a necessary formula: “Ministers, including Mr Brown, are likely to accept that Mr Blair has no choice but to give the impression that he will go on and on, even if privately that is not his intention.”Indeed, if what Blair is alleged to have told “close cabinet friends” sounds familiar, that might be because it is what the Prime Minister himself confided in Jeremy Paxman in May 2002.
