Relinquishing power is agony for a leader who has grown used to office. It gets harder the closer the moment of loss comes. “From now till the ‘day’,” Winston Churchill’s daughter Mary wrote in March 1955 of her father’s impending resignation, “it will be hard going. He minds so much. It’s the first death.”
A shockingly accurate insight. And mythically convincing, too. Even the resolute Odin hesitates on the threshold of powerlessness because he knows he will die when he steps across. Naturally Shakespeare says it magnificently too. Death holds court within the monarch’s hollow crown, Richard II reflects. At the last, he punctures regal pomp with a little pin — and farewell king.
It is hardly surprising that few prime ministers have walked cheerfully out of the door of No. 10 for the last time. Most have gone grudgingly, like Churchill, defeated, ill, or, in Campbell-Bannerman’s case, dead. In the past century, only Harold Wilson and Stanley Baldwin could claim to have been masters of their own exits, and only Baldwin stopped to tell the man on the Downing Street door: “I am now a gentleman of leisure.”
Tony Blair is therefore on the verge of doing something unusual and very difficult. Down the years, he has often said he feels no inner need to cling to office. Yet as the actual day of departure nears and the reality of what he is about to lose becomes more real, he gives little sign of being mentally or emotionally prepared for the trauma that awaits him. He hasn’t got it yet.
To those around him this is how it should be. Let the shock hit him afterward; until he leaves he must go on governing at full tilt, they say. Outwardly, and perhaps to himself, Blair gives the impression of doing this. But as the days tick by, the outward show is merely that. The Downing Street policy review persuades few — and certainly not the group surrounding the website 2020Vision. The talk of major new initiatives rings ever more cracked. Blair’s insistence on being at this or that summit in the summer feels increasingly an act of vanity.
It is strange, drifting time, in some ways more like the final days of a long-reigning medieval monarch than the playing out of a democratic political process. Nothing can happen until he goes. But no one is pushing him to leave. The Brownite passions of 2004 and 2006 have abated. The government is segueing into post-Blair mode. You were the future, once, David Cameron taunted him a year ago. Now he is very nearly not the present either.
We are nevertheless on the verge of a most delicate and potent piece of political choreography. Labour’s medium-term future as a governing party rests largely on whether it works. The arrangements are now being put in place for Britain’s first-ever party plebiscite to select a prime minister. Two weeks from now, on March 20, Labour’s national executive will be asked to approve a set of rules for the contests to succeed Blair and John Prescott. The details of those rules are being secretly drawn up in consultation with Labour officials and Brown’s advisers. Not everything is finalized but their likely shape can now be discerned.
Shortly after the May 3 elections, Blair and Prescott will officially announce that they are stepping down. This will trigger a two-stage transition. In stage one, which most officials think will last for around two weeks, candidates will try to collect the nominating signatures of 44 Labour MPs. In stage two, which will last for around six weeks, the three equal parts of Labour’s electoral college — MPs, ordinary members and union levy payers — will conduct ballots whose results will be announced at a short special party conference.
The timing is in Blair’s hands. He is desperate to attend the G-8 summit in Germany from June 6-8, which will discuss climate change, and the EU summit in Brussels on June 21, at which France’s new president may signal a new initiative on the EU Constitution. Brown appears disposed not to interfere with these plans. Presumably Blair will want to report to MPs after Brussels. If Labour chooses to hold its special conference in London at a weekend, then my best guess — and it really is no more than that — is that Blair will cease to be prime minister on or around Saturday June 30. Many unknowns remain. It is still possible, for instance, that before May 3 Blair may pre-announce his intention; opinions in No. 10 are divided on this. The date of the official announcement may vary too. Brown thinks No. 10 will leak to the Murdoch press on May 3, attempting to wipe the expected bad election results off the Friday front pages and news bulletins. No. 10 talks of a midweek announcement when MPs return to Westminster after the May Day bank holiday.
And what happens if only one person, presumably Brown, is nominated? Hours of agonizing have been devoted to this question. Officially, that candidate can only be declared elected at a special conference, so on cost grounds this moment is likely to be deferred until the conference at which the new deputy is elected. Earlier talk in No. 10 of a confirmatory ballot for a one-nomination leadership contest is receding. But Brown could find himself prime minister-elect, and ready to form a government, from as early as mid-May.
That would be a novel constitutional situation. The bigger innovation, though, whose implications have barely been thought through, is that a prime minister is being chosen by an electoral college in which trade union members hold a third of the votes. This will matter little if Brown is unopposed. Yet imagine a scenario in which Candidate A wins a majority among MPs, while Candidate B wins a majority among union levy payers and party members and thus becomes prime minister.
Either way, the political impact on the wider electorate of Labour’s controversial voting system has yet to be tested. However, with the public sector unions in revolt over the chancellor’s pay restraint policy, the timing of the contest could be awkward for Brown. A divisive election of this kind would be a great political gift to David Cameron. It is another hint that the strange political transition on which we are embarked may be less a shift from Blair to Brown and more a swing from Labour to the Conservatives.
