The Prime Minister and his party are not enjoying their Pinteresque dialogue

Labour MPs largely want to talk about Iraq and Mr Blair wants, mainly, to talk about the budget and domestic battles

Middle East

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Angry backbenchers accuse Blair of double standards

Donald Macintyre: The PM and his party are not enjoying their Pinteresque dialogue

Simon Carr: What Blair lacked in certainty he certainly made up for in banality

David Horovitz: This is why the Israelis support Mr Sharon's tactics

In a large sense the marriage between Tony Blair and the Parliamentary Labour Party is one of convenience. They aren't, on the whole, in love with each other. Like other marriages of convenience however, it has worked extraordinarily well. But at times it lends a distance to the relationship. Yesterday's packed meeting of the PLP was a case in point.

There wasn't a punch-up. Mr Blair was, by most accounts, at his most emphatic and focused. He showed no signs whatever of being fed up with his lot. He was incidentally more enthusiastic about the prospects for euro entry – provided the economic tests are met – than anyone could remember him at a party meeting. And by the standards of the more acrimonious PLP meetings in Labour's long and turbulent history it was positively decorous.

And yet there was somehow an absence of connection. Rather like the dialogues in Harold Pinter plays in which the two characters are each having half of two separate conversations, Mr Blair and many of his party wanted to speak about different things. They largely wanted to talk about Iraq. He wanted, mainly, to talk about the budget and the domestic battles ahead. He wasn't – quite – patronising his party by saying "leave all this grown-up international stuff to me and you concentrate on winning the argument with the Tories over tax". But he was urging them not to be so distracted by international affairs as to forget that the central, and for New Labour novel, argument presumed to underline Gordon Brown's budget next week will have to be fought for – namely that increases in direct taxation are needed to renew Britain's struggling public services.

When, as a result, the backbench pressure sharply intensified later in the Commons, he promised a full parliamentary debate. Equally it was clear, listening to Iain Duncan Smith's much more hawkishly pro-Israel speech, that there's a widening gap between the parties on the Middle East. But Mr Blair did not, as he had consistently done on Afghanistan, spell out in exhaustive detail the process of building a coalition, at home, in Europe, and in the Arab world before action could be taken against Iraq.

In particular he did not overtly respond to invitations behind the closed doors of the PLP meeting to promise that no action would be taken against Iraq until a credible peace process was under way in the Middle East. On one level this is odd. Ask almost any Blair adviser or Cabinet minister and he will tell you that this is indeed the case, that it is crazy to think of attacking Iraq before Ariel Sharon can be persuaded or forced to reverse a strategy which is not only doomed to lead to more violence, but is also in flagrant violation of UN resolutions, including one very recent one which the British Prime Minister continues to support.

Yes, it's admitted, there are those in Washington on the Republican right who think an attack on Iraq is possible while the Israeli government behaves as it is. But they have been isolated, the same figures maintain, and the Secretary of State Colin Powell's position strengthened at the expense of the hawks by recent events.

So why not say so clearly at a party meeting, particularly since the presumption must be that this is the line he took at Crawford, Texas? To which the Government's semi-official answer is, first, that there is every reason for avoiding public statements which will only encourage Saddam Hussein to do what he can to foment prolonged conflict in Israel-Palestine as a means of delaying an attack across his own borders. Secondly, it's argued, the true significance of the Blair-Bush exchanges is that the US has now signed up to the paramount priority of securing access for the UN weapons inspectors. What's more, there is intense activity under way to secure Russian agreement by next month to a new "smart sanctions" regime, further tightening the embargo on arms-related hardware, while relaxing it in respect of food and humanitarian aid. Once again, this isn't made much of in public even though a new regime would go some way to undermining Saddam's claim, however baseless, that Iraqi children are starving because of Western-led sanctions. But that may be because agreement on the new sanctions regime is far from certain.

But all this still leaves a further question, one on which Mr Blair also chose to throw no light yesterday. Which is whether further military action in Iraq would require a fresh mandate from the UN, thus requiring, among other things, Russian and French support.

All the evidence suggests that this is an unresolved question within the Government, with a significant body of Whitehall taking the view that a fresh Security Council resolution might indeed be required in international law. Ministers can argue that the advice is not clear cut, depending on which lawyer you speak to, and on what the circumstances are at the time. They can also argue that the question is academic, since any military moves on Iraq are so far away. But at some point it will not be.

So what conclusions can be drawn from all this? Labour backbenchers listened to Mr Blair – in the main – respectfully yesterday. But the critical questioning was not matched by much wholehearted support. This was perhaps because no one wanted to be a toady, but perhaps because they have not yet been convinced. Those around Mr Blair insist that the reception from the public and the party in the country is much more supportive than the PLP. That may well be true. Nor is this yet breakdown or anything like it. Indeed in the Commons the sharpest criticism, from, as it were, the left, of the Americans over both Iraq and Israel, sharper even than that of the dissident ex-minister Peter Kilfoyle, came from the impeccably Tory Douglas Hogg. But it still appears that if Mr Blair is determined to support the US over Iraq when the time comes – and all the signs post- Crawford is that he is – he will have to do more work still to bring his backbenchers behind him.

The other conclusion is this: Mr Blair laid heavy emphasis yesterday on its importance as a major step in the Government's evolution. And to the extent that unease over Iraq is a catalyst for other, more domestic concerns – which it partially is – that is indeed important. There will be a fierce battle ahead not least because the party wasn't exactly frank about the need to put up taxes during the general election. But it should be one the mainstream of the party will relish, since it will be a battle for the tax and spending on public services that many of them came into politics for. But that means that it will have to live up to their expectations as a genuine turning point. If it turns out this is an all things to all men budget which seeks too severely to limit the impact on taxpayers for electoral reasons, or even can by an exercise in smoke and mirrors, be presented as such, then it will not do. The party is looking for a robust, genuinely social democratic, budget. A lot is riding on it.

d.macintyre@independent.co.uk