Blair has two trumps to play for a third term: time and the Tories

JUST the other day I was in a small airport in a remote part of Argentina. On the wall was a prominent tribute to the local pilots who died during the 1983 effort to “reclaim the Malvinas”.

Long after the rest of the world has virtually forgotten the Falklands War, Argentineans still remember vividly.

In Buenos Aires, veterans of the combat are permanently camped outside the presidential palace, and the square which once saw General Galtieri address hundreds of thousands of cheering supporters is, to this day, bedecked with banners reading “Never forget the Malvinas”.

Looking back now, we know the British were fortunate during the Falklands War: fortunate in their opponents (ill-prepared troops led by hopelessly corrupt generals); fortunate that the Falkland islanders were unanimous in their support for their liberators, and most of all fortunate in their allies - the United States supplied much-needed weaponry to the rundown British army.

Not for Margaret Thatcher the job of dealing with ham-fisted allies and a post-victory insurrection. She had her troops home before the general election and went to the country as a successful war leader. With Iraq, Tony Blair is faced with a different ballgame. In the areas where Mrs Thatcher was fortunate, Blair has been less so.

The ill-prepared troops were not the Iraqis, but the liberators. The occupying army proved utterly unable to govern competently. The American military establishment in particular made a dreadful hames of things. And the continuing loss of soldiers’ lives has unsettled public opinion at home.

The electoral consequences have been clear and immediate. Last week, Labour lost Leicester South to the Liberal Democrats and barely clung to the safe seat of Birmingham Hodge Hill.

The success of the anti-war Lib Dems comes over and above the success of the Respect Party, led by George Galloway, the MP expelled from Labour because of his vocal opposition to toppling Saddam Hussein. The Respect Party polled 3,724 votes in Leicester, standing on the war issue.

Does all this mean that Iraq could cost Tony Blair the next general election?

Perhaps. Yet under the surface, this Labour government still has grounds for optimism. Firstly, there is still no sight of an alternative government. The Conservatives pulled out all the stops in those two by-elections. Michael Howard worked his socks off and every day busloads of Tory MPs were brought in to canvass and deliver leaflets.

The result? Third place.

The biggest loser in these by-elections was not the prime minister, but the leader of the opposition. There’s an old saying that oppositions don’t win elections, but governments lose them. For that to happen, however, the opposition must be electable. Even with the passing years, the British public seems no more anxious for another Conservative government than they were in May 1997 when the Tories were dumped from office. Michael Howard hoped that his years in the wilderness would have allowed him to reinvent himself, but people still remember him, it seems, for his gruesomely hardline speeches at Tory Party conferences of yesteryear.

Conservative support for the war in Iraq has left Howard unable to ride the wave of anti-war sentiment. Blair has not been slow to point out that Howard backed the conflict and had even said in a speech to Rupert Murdoch and his executives that, if anything, the bombs should have been dropped earlier.

Another solace for Blair is that while Iraq is the live issue at present, it may not be so in a year’s time, when the election is expected to be held.

While he has been criticised for misusing intelligence reports selectively to support the case for war, the prime minister has honed his defence and has plenty of time to hammer it home.

Yes, he will say, mistakes were made. Saddam did not have stockpiles of chemical or biological weapons ready to deploy. But there was no deliberate effort to mislead.

Blair can now point the doubters to four separate reports, arising from the investigations of Lords Butler and Hutton, the foreign affairs select committee and the intelligence and security committee. None has found him guilty of lying.

FURTHERMORE, the prime minister can still play his trump cards: Saddam is out of power, and his removal has sent a message to other dictators to behave or else. The prime minister’s response to the latest report shows his determination to deploy these political defences.

“Had we backed down in respect of Saddam,” he told the Commons, “we would... never have got progress on Libya... and we would have left Saddam in charge of Iraq, with every malign intent and capability still in place and every dictator with the same intent everywhere immeasurably emboldened. For any mistakes made, as the report finds, in good faith, I of course take full responsibility. But I cannot honestly say I believe getting rid of Saddam was a mistake at all.”

This defence will be particularly effective if, in a year’s time, Iraq has settled into a more peaceful state. And it might. Opponents of the war may describe it as a second Vietnam, but the circumstances are quite different. The majority of Iraqis support the removal of Saddam. The appalling mismanagement by the occupying forces may have helped fuel popular opposition to the foreign troops, but as time passes and power is devolved back to Iraqis, the nature of the fighting changes.

It is always easier to recruit people to take arms against a foreign army than against their own government. Moreover, if the new government handles the trial of Saddam carefully, it will focus attention on the crimes of the old regime.

Meanwhile, the huge injection of US funds will help get Iraq back on its feet. By the time Tony Blair faces his electorate, the war controversy might be seen as a mid-term blip.

Labour can even take consolation from the success of the Liberal Democrats in the recent by-elections.

The Lib Dems have always been the experts in these contests. Even Labour’s landslide victory in 1997 was preceded by sensational Liberal wins in Newbury, Christchurch and Eastleigh. It didn’t prevent a record swing to Labour at the general election.

In his analysis of recent results, Tony Blair will be casting his mind even further back. In Mrs Thatcher’s first term, we had similar circumstances to those that now exist. The government was pursuing unpopular policies, but the opposition was widely regarded as being unelectable. When Shirley Williams took Liverpool Crosby in a by-election, it seemed the Social Democrat-Liberal Alliance could sweep to power. A few months later the Alliance came out of the general election with only 23 seats and Mrs Thatcher was returned to office with a larger majority than before. Next year, Tony Blair will hope history will repeat itself.