The Gould decade?

Comment is Free today features a somewhat preposterous counterfactual by Neil Clark speculating on what sort of country we would now be living in if Tony Benn rather than Blair had just chalked up 10 years in power.

I have already posted a comment to this effect HERE but it seems to me that a much more plausible alternative history would have Bryan Gould celebrating a decade as Labour premier - for the simple reason that unlike Benn Gould could actually have become Labour leader in the 90s.

In 1992, he was offered a deal by John Smith under which Smith promised to support him for the deputy leadership if he stood aside from the leadership race and allowed Smith a coronation. Had Gould agreed to this, he would have become deputy leader and thus acting leader when Smith died.

Blair or Brown would still have challenged him for the leadership, but there is just a chance that Gould might have been able to put together enough of a coalition to hold onto the job. Had he done so, he and not Blair would have become Prime Minister on May 2, 1997.

Were you there?

Well, I was, but with the hacks on the other side of the street rather than the cheering crowds pictured here.


It was possibly the craziest day of my entire working life. I had gone up to Newcastle the day before to cover the election for my paper, The Journal, and worked through the night with colleagues to produce our election special edition. At 6am I got on the London train, arriving back in my office in the Press Gallery at 9.30am. Then it was off to Downing Street to hear John Major's graceful exit. At that stage I reckoned I would be at work at least another 8-9 hours, so I envied him being able to go off and watch cricket on such a beautiful day.

Eventually the new Prime Minister arrived in triumph, having kissed hands at the Palace minutes earlier. "I should tell you that earlier this morning, I was invited by Her Majesty the Queen to form a government," he informed us in a slightly self-deprecating way, before going on to make his much-parodied statement about governing as old Tories New Labour. He also paid a generous tribute to Major, triggering a minor outbreak of booing among the more graceless (and less choreographed) elements of the cheering crowd.

By mid-afternoon, the details of the first Cabinet appointments were emerging and by 5am we were back at No 10 for the new government's first Lobby briefing. Alastair Campbell strode in to the basement room to general cheering from the hacks, who still, at that stage, regarded him as one of them. Asked how the new Prime Minister felt, he replied: "He realises that he has been given a remarkable opportunity to unite the country." It was a phrase that has always stuck in my mind.

I finally arrived back at my flat in Islington that night at 8pm, having had no sleep for 36 hours except for a few snatched moments on the train. It had been hugely satisfying, if rather exhausting, to have watched history unfolding at such close quarters, though not an experience I necessarily wanted to repeat. But of course, four years later, in June 2001, I did!

An empty anniversary

Actually, the real anniversary is tomorrow. Blair did not become Prime Minister until May 2, 1997, the day on which he was invited by the Queen to form a government, but predictably, most newspapers are treating today as marking Blair's 10 years.

I'll give my considered thoughts on what his premiership will be remembered for after he announces his resignation next week, but in the meantime, what significance should we attach to the fact that Blair has now emulated Walpole, North, Pitt, Liverpool and Thatcher by serving a continuous decade in power?

Well, the answer to that is not a lot, in my view. As that list demonstrates, it's a milestone that neither necessarily reflects greatness, nor necessarily confers it.

The truth is that Blair should not have remained Prime Minister this long, either for the good of the country, the good of the Labour Party, or for the good of his own historical reputation. That he has finally chalked up ten years is more a tribute to his tenacity and to the paucity of alternatives than to any real and lasting sense of political achievement.

As I have written before, Blair should in all conscience have gone in 2003, after the David Kelly scandal. The fact that no-one in the government was prepared to take the rap for this tragic episode has always seemed to me an appalling dereliction of responsibility.

Whether or not it was Alastair Campbell himself, it is quite clear that someone in the government spin machine took the decision to release Dr Kelly's name, and under the doctrine of ministerial responsibility, it was Mr Blair who should have been ultimately held accountable.

As the late Hugo Young wrote at the time, the suicide of Dr Kelly was no random act of chance. It was an illustration of "the dynamic that is unleashed when the Prime Minister's sainted reputation becomes the core value his country has to defend."

Blair could even have made it a resignation on a point of honour, like Lord Carrington's over the Falklands invasion in 1982. He could have said "I was not responsible for this, and I deplore the chain of events that led to it, but the buck stops with me."

Of course, Blair survived, but nothing was ever quite the same again. Early in 2004, he seems to have experienced a momentary realisation that the catastrophic loss of trust that had occurred as a result of the war and its aftermath could not be regained under his leadership.

He could have gone then, handed over to Gordon Brown while the latter's reputation was still sky-high, ensuring Labour another three-figure majority in 2005 over Michael Howard's right-wing Tory rabble.

Instead, Blair hugely outstayed his welcome, and the results of that will be plain for all to see in Thursday night's local elections when Labour's support slumps to near the levels the party enjoyed when he first entered Parliament at the "suicide note" election of 1983.

Less than a year ago, a leaked Downing Street memo laughably suggested that Blair should "go with the crowds wanting more." He's actually going when the crowds can't wait to see the back of him. And he has only himself to blame.