Watch your back

Jan 18th 2005
From The Economist Global Agenda

Britain’s main opposition leaders have launched the campaign platforms from which they hope to bring down Tony Blair, in an election expected in May. But the prime minister’s main challenge comes from an internal rival: his brooding and resentful finance minister

SINCE sweeping to power in 1997 with a huge parliamentary majority, Tony Blair has become one of a small number of European government heads who achieve name recognition around the world. The last British leader to accomplish this was Margaret Thatcher, with whom Mr Blair has proved to have much in common, despite their coming from opposing parties. Like the Iron Lady, Mr Blair has shown himself to be a conviction politician, determined to lead his party rather than follow its consensus. Like her, he has made Britain’s “special relationship” with America the fundament of his foreign policy, most notably in backing George Bush’s Iraq war.

Having won an easy re-election in 2001, Mr Blair has been in power for almost eight years and British voters are finding it ever harder to remember what life was like under any other prime minister. But they now are beginning to wonder how long the Blair era has left to run—and who might take his place. Though Mr Blair is not obliged to call an election until 2006, he is widely expected to go to the voters this May. On Monday January 17th, Britain’s two main opposition parties, the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats, launched their campaign platforms. Six days earlier, Mr Blair’s Labour Party had begun a big advertising campaign bragging about his government’s supposed feats, such as the “longest period of economic growth for 200 years” and the “lowest unemployment for 29 years”.

In Lady Thatcher’s prime, in the 1980s, the Conservatives looked like the country’s natural party of government. But since dumping her in 1990, they have torn themselves apart over Britain’s place in the European Union. The party’s current leader, Michael Howard, is its third in four years. When he took over in 2003, his rivals seemed content to let him have the job, so convinced were they that the party was doomed to lose the coming election. Under Mr Blair, Labour had stolen many of the Conservatives’ best clothes, such as sound economic management and reform of public services.

Mr Howard’s attempts to revive the fortunes of the “Tories” have so far come to nothing. On Sunday, on the eve of the Conservatives’ big campaign launch, a Populus poll in the News of the World, a tabloid, suggested that Labour is set to win another crushing parliamentary majority, of around 160 seats, almost unchanged from now.

Some Conservatives, looking across the Atlantic at Mr Bush’s bold tax cuts—and recent re-election—have been pressing Mr Howard to adopt a similar strategy and pledge deep cuts in taxes. Others worry that this would allow Mr Blair to portray the Conservatives as wreckers of public services. Thus, while the campaign platform launched by Mr Howard on Monday promises an eye-catching £35 billion ($65 billion) of cuts in “wasteful” public spending, the Conservative leader said only £4 billion of that would be used to cut taxes, with the rest being diverted towards hospitals, schools and policing, or used to cut borrowing.

Though Mr Blair’s government has partly undone Lady Thatcher’s good works in cutting the tax burden, the state’s share of British GDP has risen by only a few percentage points, to 44.4%—well below the euro area’s 48.6%. And though voters grumble that their higher taxes have not done much to improve rickety public services, there are few signs of an incipient taxpayers’ revolt.

The Liberal Democrats, in their campaign launch on Monday, promised more tax not less, including increasing the top rate of income tax from 40% to 50%. Charles Kennedy, the Lib Dems’ leader, has landed a few punches on Mr Blair, especially over the Iraq war, which he and his party strongly opposed. But despite claiming in his campaign launch that the Lib Dems were now “the real opposition”, the polls continue to show that Mr Kennedy has almost no chance of becoming Britain’s next prime minister.

So, Mr Blair will not be losing sleep over the threat from Mr Howard or Mr Kennedy. But he certainly will be watching his back against the threat from his finance minister, Gordon Brown, who deeply resents Mr Blair’s breaking of a supposed promise to hand the prime minister’s job to him by now. A biography of Mr Brown (“Brown’s Britain” by Robert Peston, Short Books), out this week, quotes him as telling Mr Blair: “There is nothing that you could say to me now that I could ever believe”—which the prime minister’s opponents think chimes perfectly with the electorate’s post-Iraq mistrust of Mr Blair. They plan to plaster it all over their election campaigns.

Last week, when news of this quotation emerged, it was reported that a furious Mr Blair demanded a denial or retraction from Mr Brown—and didn’t get it. The prime minister then called a news conference that upstaged an important speech that Mr Brown had been scheduled to make at exactly the same time—coincidence or petty vengeance? There has been much talk of Mr Brown resigning—or Mr Blair sacking him. In either case, that would leave Mr Brown fuming, and plotting, on the back benches.

If Mr Blair wins another huge and largely loyal majority, why should he care about Mr Brown’s sulking? Perhaps the biggest threat to the prime minister is an issue that divides Labour—and the country as a whole—as much as it does the Conservatives: the referendum that Mr Blair has promised to hold, probably next year, on the proposed European Union constitution. Polls suggest Britons are likely to vote no, in which case Mr Blair, having staked his reputation on getting a yes, may be forced to resign. Mr Brown has always been careful to portray himself as a little more sceptical about the EU, its institutions and its single currency than Mr Blair. This could be his big chance to get even.

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