By Stryker McGuire

Newsweek International

 

Oct. 10, 2005 issue - The other day, a NEWSWEEK reporter called the office of one of Tony Blair's closest associates. He wanted to set up an appointment to talk about the British prime minister's legacy. An assistant called back to say, "He's happy to talk to you, but not about legacy. He wanted me to remind you that we don't do legacy. He says we're not dead yet."

Far from it. Five months into what he's said is his last term in office, Blair last week outlined an ambitious reform agenda. Cutting across health, education, the environment and beyond, his manifesto for change could hardly be executed overnight. Even if it could, Blair had a warning for his Labour Party's annual conference: "Every time I've ever introduced a reform in government, I wish, in retrospect, I had gone further."

What Blair has in mind, of course, is a legacy agenda—though he, like his associate, doesn't utter the L word. And there's the problem. Unarguably, Blair is the most electorally successful Labour leader ever: the party's first to serve three terms as prime minister. Arguably, he is also one of the three most important British P.M.s of the postwar period—and certainly would be if he could somehow construct a Britain that merged the best of the Thatcher revolution with the best of Clement Atlee, creator of the modern welfare state. Over the past eight years, he has built on Margaret Thatcher's economic reforms and sought to rebuild health, education and transport structures that he believes suffered from shameful underinvestment under the Conservatives. Yet debilitated by the Iraq war, distracted by terrorism and (critics would say) let down by his own failings as a leader, Blair is left with a record that looks inadequate even to his acolytes. Too much Iraq, and too little else.

Time is now running out. Britain must have another general election by the summer of 2010. Before then, Blair will hand over power, presumably to Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown. If Blair continues to control his fate—not a certainty—the handover won't happen soon. On the seaside in Brighton last week, grandly hailing "the patient courage of the change maker," he sounded like a man clearing his throat, not his desk. (Note the word "patient," which did not sit well with detractors who want him to step aside within a year or 18 months.) His wife didn't sound like a short-timer either. Would she miss her life as Britain's First Lady? Cherie Blair laughed heartily and said, "Darling, that's a long way in the future." She laughed again. "It is too far ahead for me to even think about yet."

And so it continues: Britain's long-running melodrama of "Will he or won't he—and when?" Or, as the Labour M.P. Bob Marshall-Andrews calls it, "the dance of the seven veils." The dance is a symptom of the contradiction at the heart of Blair's two terms. Yes, he is one of Labour's great figures. Yet both the country and his party have fallen out of love with him. His approval ratings have declined fairly steadily since his landslide election in 1997. Labour got 1.1 million fewer votes in this year's election than it did in 2001; according to an analysis by the research firm MORI, only 51 percent of those who said they voted Labour in 2001 did so again last May. The party activists who attended last week's conference still admire Blair's electability—but they resent his siding with America on Iraq and, closer to home, that he is so far to their right on social issues. Their lukewarm response to his speech was aptly described by a cartoonist as a "crouching ovation."

It's not that he hasn't tried. During Blair's first two terms, he pursued a reformist agenda but was hobbled almost every step of the way. First, he chose to go slow so as not to spook Conservative Party voters who crossed party lines to vote for him. Further along, the Treasury under Brown, Blair's longtime rival, stifled reforms it didn't like or believed Britain couldn't afford, operating as "a government within a government," in the words of Labour Party biographer Andrew Rawnsley. Then came the war. As one of Blair's closest associates put it, "The entire second term was hijacked by Iraq."

As a consequence, there are a lot of leftovers on Blair's plate. Looking back, it seems absurd for the government to have touted 1999 as "the year of delivery." Per—haps the country was expecting too much after Blair's first election victory—but the government couldn't deliver then, nor has it since. Partly as a result of this, writes the commentator Peter Riddell in a new book, "The Unfulfilled Prime Minister," Blair has come to be seen within his party as a "distant, remote, un-Labour figure." Adds biographer Anthony Seldon: "He's an impresario for whom winning power means more than the workings of power. He's been successful electorally. But his personal agenda—on public services, Europe, democratic renewal, peace in the world—remains very largely unfulfilled. That's the Blair enigma."

It's hard to see things getting better. Gordon Brown has been a chief adversary ever since Blair, and not Brown, became party leader in 1994. He's been quiescent since last spring's election campaign. But that's because Brown, more confident than ever that he's the only possible successor to Blair, knows he will benefit from a smooth transition. "After eight years he's finally figured out that it doesn't pay to be in opposition against Tony," says Nick Pearce of the Institute for Public Policy Research. In his own speech to the party conference, Brown made the cooing noises of a team player. He thanked Blair for his leadership. He spoke in Blairite terms of not only "New Labour" but "New Labour renewed"; in the past he's shunned "new" in a nod to the Labour left. He even, for what it's worth, spoke in sentences without verbs, like Blair's speeches.

But those cheery atmospherics are not likely to last. Both camps expect old differences between the prime minister and the chancellor to bedevil Blair's third term. Downing Street has teams working on several crucial white papers. They will define Blair's legacy agenda in three areas: education, health and "respect," the government's catchall for measures to address antisocial behavior like drunkenness and juvenile delinquency. The goal, according to one close aide, is to "make reforms that are permanent and self-sustaining."

Yet already, deadlines for the white papers are said to be slipping, amid carping that Brownites are slowing things down. With one eye on the eventual transition, Blair loyalists like Work and Pensions Secretary David Blunkett are hedging their bets and building bridges to the enemy camp. Brown's Treasury has always had leverage over Blair's policy initiatives by controlling the money to pay for them. Now the British economy is cooling. GDP growth is at a 12-year low, consumption growth at a 10-year low. The budget deficit, at 3.2 percent of GDP, is in breach of European Union rules. "I sometimes think No. 10 is in denial about how much they can do," says a government official who used to work at Downing Street.

And as ever, there's Iraq. "Nothing was the same [after the 2003 invasion], and there was a sense of the end approaching—even if it might still be years away," writes Riddell in a new book. No single factor was more damaging than Blair's association with U.S. President George W. Bush. Yet he is unrepentant. Asked last week about withdrawing British troops, Blair sounded like Bush: "The time scale is: when the job's done." According to a poll in The Guardian the next day, only 12 percent of Britons share Blair's view that British troops are helping to improve the security situation in Iraq. Sadly but tellingly, the most lasting image of the conference in Brighton will not be his speech, but the sight of burly stewards manhandling 82-year-old delegate Walter Wolfgang out of the hall after he shouted "Nonsense!" when Foreign Secretary Jack Straw maintained that Britain was helping to bring democracy to Iraq.

To Brownites, the way forward is clear: the chancellor becomes prime minister sooner rather than later. But how many Britons agree? Even among Labour supporters, and despite Blair's unpopularity, only 28 percent want him to stand down in the "next couple of years," according to a Guardian poll. A majority want him to hang on "as long as possible." Among Britons at large, Brown is more trusted than Blair, by a wide margin, but that's because he's judged mostly on his economic management (and is not blamed for Iraq). The sooner-or-later battle broke out again last week when Blair, in his speech, put pressure on Brown to advance the timing of the Treasury's all-important comprehensive spending review, which sets the government's spending priorities. In July, Brown peremptorily postponed the review by one year, to 2007—in effect preventing Blair from getting off to a quick third-term start. Blair-Brown watchers also saw this as a sign that the chancellor expected to assume power from Blair during the second half of 2007.

There was a time when Blairites were determined to find an alternative to Brown as Blair's successor. Some still are, but most are resigned to Brown's ascension. In both camps, the party line is that Brown, widely considered a more traditional leftist than Blair, "is to the right of where most people think he is," as one of Blair's senior aides put it. Another source, one of Blair's closest political advisers, worries that some of Brown's followers want to revert to the "left-right politics of the past. That strikes me, frankly, as insane. We had that in the '70s and '80s, and it got us one successive electoral defeat after another." So then you need to build the Labour Party around somebody other than Brown? "I think there are people who believe that. Probably over half the Cabinet think that. But finding the person is another matter."

Whatever happens, the end of the Blair-Brown joint adventure is near. For all their rivalry, this prime minister and his chancellor have formed the most successful and durable partnership of its kind in British history. "With Blair and Brown, one plus one equals much more than two," says Labour M.P. Denis MacShane. If Labour goes into the next election with Brown and without Blair, support for the party is likely to slip further. That doesn't mean Labour will lose; the Conservative Party demolished by Blair and Brown in 1997 is still a long way from recovery. But when your greatest chance of survival rests on the weakness of others, you know your days—or at least your years—are numbered. At the very least, that doesn't leave much time to build a legacy.

With Martin Stabe in London