Blair may see off Kelly challenge but education cuts are just wrong
No doubt as you read this, you'll be bombarded by media reports about the likely outcome of his twin crises. By the end of the week, I wonder how much of a damp squib it will have turned out to be.
These twin crises both seem to be largely of his own making. But before I go into them, isn't it interesting that it seems to happen in a politician's life that "troubles come not in single spies but in battalions". For that reason, the great politicians need one quality above all others. Of course great politicians need character, intellect, vision, focus, determination, a streak of ruthlessness, an ability to communicate and to listen, a capacity to make firm decisions when they must. But above all, at moments like this, they need stamina. Indeed, I've often thought that perhaps it is the single personal characteristic that enables greatness.
Unless you've seen it at close quarters, it's hard to understand how pressure builds up around leaders when a number of critical issues come together. Events move at an incredibly fast pace; advice changes from moment to moment; there are always things going on in the background that have the capacity to surprise.
The greater the crisis, the more the leader is, in the end, alone in his decision-making, and in his capacity to respond.
I don't know whether Tony Blair has the necessary stamina to get through what looks like being a bad week.
His health doesn't appear to have been great in recent months, and he shows all the signs of a man who has aged rapidly in office, especially during the Iraq war and its build-up. He does seem to have all the other qualities I've mentioned, plus what looks like a lot of belief in his own rightness (sometimes a dubious quality).
But the pressure he is experiencing now, and that will build up as the week goes on, would break many men (and I've seen it happen). Especially in a situation where he knows that every word he utters will be parsed and analysed, every nervous tic interpreted, even a smile or a frown in the wrong place misunderstood, he is walking a tightrope.
If he makes it to the other side, we'll all be wondering what the fuss was. If he doesn't, his enemies will gather to put the knife in.
Who are Tony Blair's enemies? To listen to some of the media, you'd believe he is besieged by them. But is that true? His standing among the people is still relatively high for a leader who has been there as long as he has. The great majority of Labour MPs owe their careers in politics to him, and many are passionate loyalists. The media in Britain, by and large, are deeply hostile, and there is a strong sense in everything you read that they are longing for a showdown.
But the MPs who hold Blair's future in their hands are equally aware that even if they change their loyalties, the media won't give Tony Blair's likeliest successor any more of a honeymoon. For the moment their darling is Michael Howard, and you can bet your bottom dollar that he is the one likely to emerge from this week with his reputation enhanced, if the media have their way.
But Blair will have to really mess up if his own troops are to turn against him in any significant new numbers.
The first and most urgent issue he faces is of course the Hutton report. Here he will at least have the advantage of some additional preparation time. As I understand it, the timetable for publication of Hutton involves a press conference by Lord Hutton himself around lunchtime tomorrow, accompanied by publication of the report on the web. But advance copies are being delivered to 10 Downing Street, the BBC, the Kelly family, the Speaker of the House of Commons, and BBC reporters Andrew Gilligan and Susan Watts today.
Assuming none of them leaks the report, it means that the Prime Minister and his team can begin to get their defences ready (assuming they need defences) a full day before the opposition has sight of it.
AT 6am tomorrow, the Tory and Liberal Leaders Michael Howard and Charles Kennedy, with one aide each, will go to the cabinet office in Whitehall to be allowed first sight of the Hutton report. They will have six hours to read it and decide their line of attack.
At noon, the first great showdown is possible, because Howard and Blair will face each other at prime minister's question time. By then, Howard will know what is in the report, but will face the dilemma that if he spills the beans (Lord Hutton won't have published yet) he will be attacked for trying to steal the report's thunder for party political advantage.
Don't forget that Lord Hutton has more to report on than whether Tony Blair is culpable in the death of David Kelly. The most sensitive question he must deal with is how and why Kelly died.
He died (and everyone but the most deluded conspiracy theorists believe this) by his own hand. But did he die because he was placed under intolerable pressure by unwarranted government decisions?
Or did he die because he had, in talking to the media, exceeded his own brief, and then hid the extent of his involvement when he was grilled by a Commons committee?
I believe it is impossible to have followed the entire saga without coming to the conclusion that David Kelly was not at ease with himself from the moment he spoke to the BBC and I don't believe that Lord Hutton is going to conclude that the British government had an obligation to protect his identity.
On the other issue Blair faces, the issue of education fees, he and his government have got it wrong from the start.
If they're beaten on a vote tonight by a back-bench rebellion, as they could be, they ought to just take their lumps and abandon what was a really bad policy choice in the first place. No government can argue that it is passionately committed to universal education on the one hand and that it makes good sense to burden people with many years of debt to pay for it on the other.
The system proposed by Blair's Government for forcing students to make a contribution from later earnings towards the cost of their college degrees is utterly unworkable, and will result in anomalies and inequities for years to come. It also flies in the face of a core Labour value, and it's not in the least surprising that so many Labour MPs are in uproar over it.
Where Hutton is concerned, Tony Blair cannot afford to be seen to be wrong.
Where education is concerned, he can just about. Provided that's the way it works out, we shouldn't write him off for quite a while yet.
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