In the tearooms of the House of Commons, where Blair has commanded an unassailable majority since 1997, there’s even conspiratorial talk about the need for “regime change” in London. “Whatever happens, I think he will emerge diminished in authority,” Chris Smith, a Labour member of Parliament who was in Blair’s first cabinet, told NEWSWEEK. “I think the better course of action would be [for him] to step aside. If there’s no U.N. authorization and he proceeds, three quarters of the population and a very substantial number of M.P.s in his party will be against him.”
Things are bad enough already. Popular support for a war without U.N. authority has sunk to 19 percent. Blair’s party erupted in full revolt last month, when nearly a third of Labour’s M.P.s asserted that the case for going to war in Iraq was “as yet unproven.” If Blair goes to war without U.N. backing, one or more of his cabinet ministers may resign. Yet another threat to Blair comes from the Labour Party’s National Executive Committee, which is less firmly under his control. Last week some NEC members were calling for an extraordinary party conference to install a new leader. For now, this seems unlikely.
Washington has tried to ease Blair’s plight, but with little effect. According to one U.S. diplomat in Europe, the “second resolution dance” of the past two weeks was “all about Blair.” And when Bush announced last Friday that he was ready to promote the creation of a provisional Palestinian state, he was answering a request that Blair had been making for months. Yet some supposed “help” from America has been counterproductive. Last week Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld might have thought he was tossing a lifeline to Blair when he said it was possible the United States would go to war without British forces. But back in London, that seemed cruelly dismissive of Britain, which has sent 43,000 troops to the Gulf.
Blair is sticking to his guns. “We hold firm to the course we have set out,” he told the Commons last week. That resolve has earned him respect even among some critics. He also has acquired, as London’s antiwar Guardian newspaper said last week, “a more human side to the all-vanquishing Teflon Tony” of his earlier years, “a man set free from focus groups and ready to follow the logic of his convictions.” For the time being, Labour loyalists and pro-war Conservatives will protect Blair from a parliamentary crisis. Yet he is now staking everything on the war itself. To survive, Blair needs a good one–in the words of a senior aide, “short, sharp and pain-lite.”
