John Rentoul: On his 50th birthday, it is clear what really matters to the Prime Minister

Soon he will have been in office for longer than any rivals except Salisbury and Thatcher. Matching her is important to him

Tuesday 06 May 2003 00:00 BST
Comments

After six years in power, Tony Blair is still eight years younger than the average age at which 20th-century prime ministers took office. He has, therefore, the advantage over his predecessors of great reserves of energy. Despite the common observation about how much he has aged, he looks pretty fit and I detect no diminishing of his restless ambition. On the contrary, he seems less cautious about concealing his impatience.

But if he pauses at all today, his 50th birthday, to reflect on his age, he must think about what he has lost in the past six months. Labour may have recovered in the opinion polls since the fall of Baghdad, and his personal ratings are back to pre-war levels, but he has been weakened.

There are many Labour Party members who will not forgive him for the war in Iraq, and many non-aligned liberals beyond the party who feel the same. There was no equivalent of the Falklands factor in last week's local elections, in which the anti-war Liberal Democrats did exceptionally well. Mr Blair is back where he started, regarded as a crypto-Tory by his own party but tolerated because he is an electoral asset. Only now the feelings run deeper and the benefit of the doubt has gone.

It is not a comfortable position for a Labour Prime Minister to be in receipt of such glowing tributes from Conservatives while enduring the sullen hostility of his own party. Margaret Thatcher's endorsement in particular – "a bold and effective war leader" – can only have aggravated that hostility.

Of course, while the next general election promises to be as one-sided an affair as the military engagement in Iraq, and while he has a majority of 165 in the House of Commons, the concept of weakness is relative. He is still in a stronger position than any of his Labour predecessors. Given that he started with a majority of 179 and an approval rating of 93 per cent, however, it was obvious that things could only get worse. If politics is the art of survival, trying to slow the inevitable losses inflicted by the passage of time on a stock of political capital, then the last few months have seen a run on the Bank of Blair. He is still comfortably solvent, but less so than before.

He is weaker in other senses, too. One of his historic ambitions as Prime Minister was to push his country and himself to a leading role in Europe. He would be the bridge between the United States and the European Union. That bridge has fallen, unrepairable for the foreseeable future. His argument that Britain did not have to choose between the US and Europe, because its relations with each strengthened the other, turned out to be false.

The war in Iraq was like a scientific experiment designed to test the Blair hypothesis and it was conclusively disproved. He had to choose, and he chose to stay with the US. Before that, though, his struggle to keep a bridgehead in Europe proved divisive. Shockingly for such a consensus politician, he led the collection of signatures from the eight pro-war member and future member states that advertised Europe's separation into two blocs.

So why did he do it? I think the idea that he went to war out of passionate conviction is only a partial truth. True, he did say, within six months of becoming Prime Minister, that Saddam Hussein was a threat to the world who would have to be dealt with, by force if necessary. He has therefore been consistent about the principle, but there was always room for doubt about the "if necessary" and the timing. For nearly three years, the issue was one of what kind of sanctions were needed to restrain Saddam.

Then came 11 September. Within days, Mr Blair realised that George Bush would go for Iraq after he had dealt with Afghanistan. He effectively decided then that British forces would fight alongside American ones if it came to it. While the rest of the world saw only unproven connections between Saddam and al-Qa'ida, and many good reasons why the West should not prod the hornets' nest of Muslim fundamentalism, Mr Blair saw an opportunity to act.

He believed he could persuade the United Nations and the British people of the need to act against a dangerous dictator. He misjudged both – the first really important mistakes of his career. He may have been overconfident because of his success in making the case for military action against Slobodan Milosevic in 1999.

By the time that misjudgement became apparent, he was trapped by the American military timetable. The ferocity with which he argued his case was, therefore, as much to do with damage limitation as with conviction. He could at least earn some respect for taking a position at odds with public opinion.

Contrary to his slightly dramatic self-presentation afterwards, he was never likely to lose the vote in the Commons before the war: his job was on the line only if the war went badly wrong. Fortunately for him it did not, and he emerged from it the older, wiser and paradoxically weaker figure we see now.

This is more to do with his demeanour than the lines on his face. He has grown in confidence as Prime Minister, but recently has grown again. Six years ago, the amount of time spent nervously preparing for Questions in the House was such a burden that he combined the twice-weekly sessions into one. Now he takes questions from the press once a month for more than an hour, and he hardly seems to need any preparation at all. And his tone is less guarded. At Prime Minister's Questions last week, he teased Iain Duncan Smith on European defence: "We're in agreement, and that's a very good thing. I've been a bit short of that recently."

In his news conference he was languidly rude when asked how he felt about turning 50: "I think you have read enough on that over the weekend and you can dissect that. I can't be bothered to go back through it all again."

Can't be bothered? This isn't the eager-to-please fortysomething we are used to. He was plainly irritated by the attention devoted to his birthday. Certainly, I suspect other markers are more significant to him. Next year he will have been leader of the Labour Party for 10 years, and he used to say to Gordon Brown that he did not expect to do that job for more than 10 years.

But the year after that is the likely date of the next general election. And if he wins an election in 2005 and stays in office until the end of that year, he will have overtaken Asquith and Churchill and been Prime Minister for longer than his 20th century rivals except Salisbury (who served for nearly 14 years) and Thatcher (11 and a half years, although she overstayed her welcome). Matching her would be important to him, and that would take him to the end of 2008.

Tony Blair may be weakened, but I believe he intends to go on and on.

j.rentoul@independent.co.uk

The writer is the author of 'Tony Blair: Prime Minister', published by Time Warner Books

Join our commenting forum

Join thought-provoking conversations, follow other Independent readers and see their replies

Comments

Thank you for registering

Please refresh the page or navigate to another page on the site to be automatically logged inPlease refresh your browser to be logged in