Blair-must-go watch

With Tony Blair's premiership now holed below the waterline, I'm going to be keeping a fairly regular watch on this blog on what the MainStream Media and also other blogs are saying about his survival prospects.

First up is the Economist which says in an editorial that the Prime Minister would be better-off leaving office soon rather than getting into an increasingly destructive scrap with his party over public service reforms.

In today's Guardian, Polly Toynbee argues that the loans-for-peerages affair and Wednesday's schools rebellion should be seen as a warning to Mr Blair to make peace with his party and retire with good grace, although interestingly the paper itself doesn't yet go that far.

Meanwhile king of the tipsters Guido Fawkes is putting his money on an autumn departure, around the time of the Labour Conference, and after his brilliant call on the Lib Dem leadership election, who are we to disagree?

For my part, I first called on Mr Blair to go in the wake of the David Kelly affair in 2003 and he rather disappointingly failed to heed my advice, but I'm going to have another go in my columns and podcast this weekend which as ever will be available here on Monday.

As to what I actually think will happen...while I've always maintained that he will go on or around the 10th anniversary of his coming to power, in May 2007, I am seriously beginning to wonder whether he can hang around till then without doing very serious damage to the Labour Party.

Clarke flies a kite for coalition

The next General Election is still at least three years away...but already Ken Clarke is talking up the prospect of a Tory-Lib Dem coalition in an interview in today's Spectator - helpfully reproduced online at e-politix as the Speccie insists on charging us for visiting its web pages.

The idea is not so fanciful as many will instinctively suppose. As the excellent Electoral Calculus website shows, the Tories will have to be a long way in front of Labour to get an overall majority at the next election, and the best estimate at the moment is that they are likely to fall short of that.

But the issue Clarke is specifically addressing in this interview is the political dynamics which such a result will create in terms of who teams up with who in a hung Parliament. While I have absolutely no doubt that Sir Menzies Campbell would prefer to join a coalition led by Gordon Brown, that may not be an option if the Tories both win the popular vote and comprise the largest single party.

In those circumstances, as I discussed in a recent column entitled Which Way Will Ming Swing?, it would be politically impossible for the Lib Dems to sustain a defeated Labour Government in power, and Sir Ming would have little option but to get into bed with Mr Cameron.

In return, Mr Cameron would of course have to promise electoral reform, but by then he will hopefully have realised how unfair the current system is to the Tories and how they might actually benefit by the introduction of proportional representation.

Mr Cameron will no doubt deny it till he's blue in the face - but I reckon Old Ken might just be flying this kite with his leader's tacit approval.

Minister "pissed at Despatch Box"

Labour Watch has an excellent story that a senior Government minister was having difficulties remaining upright at the Despatch Box during a late-night adjournment debate earlier this week.

The minister in question is an unctuous little toad who regularly used to frequent the Press Gallery Bar of an evening in an attempt to pick up titbits about what people might be writing about the next day, so maybe he got into bad habits.

I don't know why more national newspaper diarists have not picked up on this story, but in my view it's well worth a read!