Labour's Love Lost

By J.F.O. McAllister

For almost any politician, nine years in office is long enough to curdle public opinion, but Tony Blair's fall from grace seems particularly poignant. As he stonewalled reporters last week about how soon he would depart Downing Street and issued uncharacteristically clunky ripostes during the Prime Minister's Question Time in Parliament, he scarcely resembled the vigorous, fresh-faced powerhouse who rode a landslide to office in 1997. No wonder: a year after winning a third term in office, the British leader is drenched in a storm of disdain. "He should go and give a different leader a chance," says Josie Brown, 54, an adult student in London, over lunch in the park. Francis Duncan, a Scottish taxi driver, puts it more bluntly: "Vote Tory! We're pissed off with Blair."

Blair is now the most unpopular Labour Party Prime Minister since World War II, with a 26% approval rating. In local elections two weeks ago, Labour took a drubbing, slumping to third place behind the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats. Blair has already said he will step down during this Parliament--effectively, no later than 2009--to make room for his heir apparent, Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown. But a third of voters want Blair to go now, and the political village at Westminster is so consumed with succession gossip that his stature shrinks more every day.

Although public disaffection with Blair has festered for years, the speed and scale of his decline have stunned even longtime detractors. Why have things soured so fast? One reason is the revival of the opposition Tories under their dynamic young leader, David Cameron. Another is a spate of recent government scandals, from undignified sexual shenanigans to more serious issues of misjudgment, recalling the venality and incompetence that dogged the dying days of the ancien Tory regime in the mid-1990s. But, like his comrade George W. Bush, Blair faces his biggest problem because of Iraq. Voters think he stretched the case for war. And the failure to find weapons of mass destruction, as well as the mounting strain on British forces in Iraq, has drained his support. "I didn't have any problems with him before the war," says Nigel Williams, 39, a marketing manager. "Now I think he should concede."

And yet for all his troubles, Blair has shown no signs of even thinking about stepping aside. A Labour Party activist says that when he recently told a Blair aide that a change of leadership seemed necessary, the aide "looked at me as if I'd said his child wasn't his." Despite the personal awkwardness of their complex relationship, Blair and Brown agree on most policy questions, and Blair knows a crucial part of his legacy will be how well his successor fares. But Blair, still only 53, will never have a better job. And "he has amazing self-belief," says a Downing Street official. At the same time, a Minister in Blair's camp retorts that his boss is anything but self-deluded: "If the poll numbers are this bad in six months, he'll do something different. If he encounters a blockage that convinces him he doesn't have the authority to do the job anymore, he'll go."

What will he leave behind? Beyond spurring Britain's remarkable economic performance, Blair led Labour's rise from a rump to a three-term party of government that boosted investment and raised standards in schools and hospitals. But Blair's political skill will complicate his party's future because it has motivated the opposition to copy New Labour's popular centrist policies. After years in the wilderness, the rival Tories have rallied behind Cameron, 39, who is stressing ecology, international development and the promotion of women and ethnic minorities instead of old Tory standards like immigrant bashing and tax cutting. A recent survey shows the Tories would beat Labour if a general election were held now, 37% to 31%. "Blair's legacy is also Cameron's Conservatives," says Sunder Katwala, general secretary of the Labour-affiliated Fabian Society. "The Tories' shift is really New Labour's moment of victory."

If so, it's a victory that must be carefully tended to avoid defeat. Now that it faces a breathing opposition, Labour has to resolve the internal ambiguities that Blair was able to blur, like the tension between cutting poverty and cutting taxes. The good news for Labour is that it has a crop of competent young Ministers who want to try. The ultimate test for Blair's legacy is whether Labour can prosper without him. Britain may find out soon.

With reporting by Jessica Carsen, Catherine Mayer/ London, Claire Smith/ Moray