UK's Bliar Going Down?
scotlandonsunday.com
Is this the fag-end of Blair's regime?
Brian Brady
TONY Blair came eye-to-eye with an unfamiliar world last week, as he found himself in the unprecedented position of having to explain himself to his country.
The Prime Minister, apparently unable to see what all the fuss over his constitutional changes was about, faced the House of Commons with his now-trademark spectacles perched uneasily on his nose. Wonky. Even his most fundamental equipment had let him down - maybe his optician too.
This week, of all weeks in Blair’s six years as Prime Minister, they were in good company. The ‘loyal’ Blairite Alan Milburn had left him in the lurch, like Peter Mandelson and Stephen Byers before him. His mentor Lord Irvine had stomped off into lucrative yet sulky retirement after being sacked. Blair’s remaining significant allies in the Cabinet, David Blunkett and Jack Straw, effectively vetoed key elements of his grand reorganisation of the way government works. His ‘friends’ in the European Union dismissed his new wheeze for handling asylum-seekers. The Americans continually frustrate his efforts to piece together a justification for war on Iraq based on Saddam Hussein’s Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD). And Peter Hain, the Leader of the House of Commons, accepted as a messenger for the Prime Minister, a faithful supporter of Blair’s reforms so far and an outrider for those to come, managed to ricochet the government into an entire series of embarrassments, culminating in a frightening outburst that raised the Old Labour spectre of higher taxes.
It is not always your enemies who get you into trouble. But, particularly following the spectacular failure of Iain Duncan Smith to nail Blair in public over the shambolic reshuffle, they are just about clinging to the hope that it is not always your friends who get you out of it.
"We have lived too long with the certainty that however bad we got, the Tories would always be miles worse," one of the growing band of Labour ex-ministers populating the benches behind the Prime Minister warned ruefully last night. "I am sure - I know - that we made a lot of mistakes during the first few years in government, but got away with them.
"He won’t be able to do that any more. He has cocked it up."
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Compare to the Sunday Herald's treatment:
sundayherald.com
"The Madness of King Tony"
Blair is in big trouble, and his insanity will do him in. Especially if the poodle ludicruously followed Bush's behind into Iran. |
