LONDON, 16 June 2004 — Tony Blair and Michael Howard seek to move on. The voters have delivered their verdicts. The post mortems are more or less over. Now the leaders of the two main parties will attempt to focus on other matters. The prime minister will highlight his plans for the public services. Having reshuffled his shadow Cabinet, Howard will give more details of his policies for schools and hospitals. For different reasons, both of them are hoping desperately that the voters will move on too.
No wonder Blair seeks to stride ahead. For the last few months ministers have accused the “Westminster village” of being uniquely obsessed with Iraq. Now they cite the war as the main reason for their electoral humiliation. They do so for a purpose. Under the guise of candor, the excuse allows them to add an important qualification. In their view the war will have much less force at a general election.
They argue that although Labour performed badly, it did so in unique political circumstances. These normally wary, pessimistic ministers expect their humiliation to be fleeting. They cling to the oscillating electoral experiences of Margaret Thatcher for comfort, pointing out that she did badly in mid-term elections, but won general elections by a landslide.
Not surprisingly, ministerial commentators are unreliable observers. After all they are commentating partly on themselves. When Labour was soaring in the late 1990s they gloomily proclaimed that the political battle was ominously close. Now Labour is coming third in national elections they are happily predicting electoral triumphs in the future. They are sad when they should be happy and content when they’ve cause to be worried.
A recovery for a governing party cannot be taken for granted. Harold Wilson’s landslide administration lost in 1970 after performing badly in local elections two years earlier. John Major’s government never managed to recover momentum after poor local election results. In this case, Tony Blair has a unique electoral problem in the form of the war against Iraq.
The conflict is his equivalent of Margaret Thatcher’s poll tax. Thatcher hailed the tax as a matter of principle. The detailed implications did not bother her very much. Blair supported the war as a matter of principle, but gave inadequate consideration to the consequences. Both of them assumed their principled stand would be popular with the majority of voters. The difference is that the Conservatives were in a position to abolish the poll tax. Blair cannot abolish a war.
Instead, some of his closest allies have urged him to follow the next available option and acknowledge that the intelligence in advance of the war was wrong, but that he acted in good faith. Before his big speech on the war delivered in Sedgefield earlier this year, they suggested to the prime minister that this was the moment for a cathartic mea culpa over the lack of any weapons. Blair turned to them and asked: “What headline would you prefer to read the day after the speech: ‘Blair - I was wrong about the war’ or ‘Blair — why I went to war’?” They took his point and persisted less forcefully. Blair cannot apologize for misjudging a war. My guess is that he has his doubts. He has had doubts about the outcomes of policies a lot less calamitous. But he is stuck with appearing arrogant and shifty because the alternative is even worse.
If the Conservatives were a credible alternative government, Blair would be facing a severe political crisis over this. Fortunately for him, they are some way from being so. Howard has made significant progress, but he is more or less a one-man band, as the recent Shadow Cabinet reshuffle illustrated. The changed positions of Tim Yeo and Tim Collins are likely to prompt a single question from most voters: Who are Tim Yeo and Tim Collins? Or is it Tim Collins and Tim Yeo? It is not the fault of the two Tims. In a quite extraordinary and unprecedented manner, the Conservative Party’s stars gave up after the 1997 election. They were too exhausted or demoralized to carry on. Alternatively some of those who wanted to continue were deemed too unpopular. Ken Clarke, Michael Heseltine, Michael Portillo, William Hague, John Major, and many others are nowhere to be seen. Or at least not in the Shadow Cabinet. Some of them are seen rather a lot, but not in what is supposed to be the alternative government. In 1970 Edward Heath led a highly experienced and authoritative Shadow Cabinet as he unexpectedly swept Harold Wilson aside. Howard leads a Shadow Cabinet that is still largely unknown. His policies are not known either, although that has been an advantage for him. As will become clearer over the next few weeks, the Conservatives’ plans to subsidize patients who want private operations and pupils who attend newly created private schools are unlikely to sway the doubters.
In policy terms, the party does not appear to be much further forward than the election of 2001. The choice at the next general election will be between Howard’s one-man band and the current government, a starkly different choice to the multiple ballots placed before voters last week. If the Conservatives cannot win the next election, Labour cannot lose it. This is the widely held proposition that gives Blair some political space. After a brutal drubbing, he breathes again, although in a new context in which Europe has moved center stage. As I argued last week, Europe is the issue that has determined the shape of British politics for decades, and it is about to do so again with the usual unpredictable consequences. Blair’s strategy of keeping his head down, hoping to change people’s minds by stealth, has failed disastrously. The rise of UKIP and the new European constitution means that he has no choice but to come out fighting, persuasively and loudly. If he had done so after the 1997 election things might be different now. As it is, he has to win a general election within two years in which Europe will be a much more prominent issue than it was in 1997 and 2001.
Assuming he wins the election, he will then have a referendum to fight. A cross-section of ministers I spoke to yesterday do not believe a referendum is winnable next year. They also suspect that Blair will struggle to win back some of those who deserted Labour last week to the extent that some question whether he would be in a position to call a general election next summer.
Since he became Labour leader in 1994, Blair has wallowed for much of the time in an unusual amount of political space. Now he has very little political space in which to address the most daunting challenge of all. He once described his historic objective as ending Britain’s ambiguous relationship with Europe. It would have been a tough assignment when most of the electorate and quite a lot of the media assumed he walked on water. The assignment is incomparably tougher now he struggles to stay afloat.
