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- The Observer,
- Sunday April 20 2003
A minority of people will remain very engaged with Iraq. The majority will be nudged back into interest by events such as Saddam unearthed and when Tony Blair takes his inevitable victory tour. More than likely, Iraq will steadily recede from the foreground as the weeks pass. By the next election, an event which lies two years or more away, it will have melted into the periphery of most of Britain's vision.
To be sure, there are people for whom this war has made such a defining difference to their view of Tony Blair that they will never see him the same way again. For some, mainly Labour people, British participation in the war is so unforgivable that they will be unable to bring themselves to vote Labour again so long as he is the party's leader.
Among some, mainly non-Labour people, there may be a willingness to set aside what they dislike about the Prime Minister in order to reward his resolution in the face of adversity with their support at the ballot box. I guess these groups will cancel each other out. The net advantage to Mr Blair will rough out at nil. The national mood does not taste of euphoria, but of bitterness among those who opposed the war and relief among those who supported the conflict.
Mr Blair seems to recognise this in postwar statements that have been gloat-free zones. He refers Iraq to 'the judgment of history'. With history is where most of the media, the politicians and the public will soon be content to leave the war. Into the history trunk will be packed a conflict that split the country with such rare passion and divided the Labour Party with such unusual intensity.
This makes the risks taken by Mr Blair all the more astounding, at least to those who always had him down as a man whose only fervent preoccupation was keeping himself glued to office. He has derived some obvious, instant lift from the swiftness of the allied victory. His approval ratings have had a surge. His ascendancy over the scene is re-established. Talk of a coup against his leadership is once more for the birds. The man talks ominously of discovering who his foul-weather friends were at time of extreme need. If he wants to rid himself of Clare Short, she is his to dispose of at his leisure. His more vengeful allies talk of laying waste to the carpers and the critics. More juice has been injected into the debate within the Cabinet between those who like to style themselves as 'Transformers' as distinct from those they disparage as 'Managers'.
'At last, Tony has escaped the curse of the focus groups,' one intimate told me recently. 'All those people running in to tell him what the public think can be dispensed with.' The more zealous Blairites forecast that Britain will now see Blair Unbound, a Prime Minister unleashing himself with the same carelessness of risk across every other front, domestic and foreign.
Whether they actually speak for Mr Blair himself is moot. As he approaches the six-year mark of his premiership, one thing he has surely learnt is that triumph and disaster should both be treated as impostors. This period of Blair Untouchable may prove to be just as brief as that month of Blair in Peril.
The challenges that were crowding in on the Government before all attention was consumed by Iraq have not gone away. Those dilemmas redemand engagement and some have been made more acute by the war. How Mr Blair responds to them may not be quite so dramatically different to how he would have done so before the conflict.
I'm yet to be convinced that the war has given the Prime Minister a vastly larger appetite for taking risks. An awesome risk he did take over Iraq. At a particularly precarious point, Tony Blair gathered together his three oldest children to tell them that Dad could be made redundant. He speaks the truth when he says that he feared the removal vans might have come calling at Number 10. Sir Andrew Turnbull, the Cabinet Secretary, thought it prudent to acquaint himself with the procedures for handling the resignation of a Prime Minister. Contingency plans were prepared - to which Donald Rumsfeld clumsily alluded - for scrubbing a British contribution to the war. Mr Blair had another burst of the jitters once the conflict was underway, during those few days when the invasion appeared to be getting bogged down.
This was not a gamble, certainly not in its magnitude, that he had intended to take. He thought he could persuade the country of the case for war and found he couldn't. He calculated that he'd swing the public by securing a second UN resolution and didn't get one. Opinion took much longer to move his way than he anticipated. When it did finally flip to produce a majority in favour of the conflict, this owed less to his own powers of persuasion than it did to the natural tendency of most Brits to rally behind a war once their troops are in harm's way. Any sense of self-vindication that Mr Blair feels now will not eradicate the sweaty memories of the perils that he put himself through to get here.
The first people scheduled for disappointment that he has not turned into an entirely different character will be those who dreamt that the road to the euro ran along the Euphrates. They fantasised that victory in Iraq would be swiftly followed by triumph in a referendum on the single currency. They imagined Mr Blair sweeping through liberated Baghdad on the back of a tank, issuing forth his new battle cry: 'Now join the euro!'
He would have liked this to have been true, too. Having chosen America by joining the war, the model Blairite method to triangulate back into balance would be to choose Europe by joining the single currency. Circumstance, timing and Gordon Brown have compounded to thwart that ambition. I have thought for some time that the Chancellor, a much more formidable and cunning strategist than any Saddam, would prevail in his enduring battle of will and wits with Tony Blair.
The Chancellor has again produced a negative on the single currency which the Prime Minister does not feel strong enough to resist. The public disinclination to enthuse for a eurozone in which Germany teeters on the brink of recession has been magnified by the anti-French feeling frothed up for the war by Mr Blair himself.
He has reluctantly conceded to his Chancellor's arguments against announcing an attempt to enter the euro. The outstanding wrangle between them is how positively this negative is dressed up, and the argument is no less ferocious for being about presentation. Mr Brown is willing to dispense some consolatory sops to help save Mr Blair's face with the disappointed Europhiles, but the Chancellor wants to close the door on the euro until after the next election.
Mr Blair wants that door kept open. He needs to convince pro-Europeans at home, his counterparts in the EU and himself, above all else, that the euro might still happen before the next elec tion. This is a reprise of the last major Blair-Brown euro wrestling match, in the autumn of 1997, a bout that then resolved into a victory for the Chancellor. However the decision is presented this time around, the inescapable fact is that one of Mr Blair's pre-eminent missions for his premiership has been deferred again.
To bring it closer to fulfilment, he will need to devote much energy to rebuilding relationships with France and Germany, and rehabilitating Europe in the eyes of Britain. Here the Prime Minister's desire to make good on the destiny he has set for himself collides with the priorities of most of the electorate.
They want to see him putting schools and hospitals first. And I don't mean the shattered classrooms and looted operating theatres in Iraq. For more than 18 months, since the attacks on the Twin Towers, Mr Blair has been obsessed with the world. I suspect he will find that most of his electorate now want him to come home.
That was the lesson of the big war of Mr Blair's first term. During the Kosovo conflict, he likewise feared that he had exposed himself to peril, that: 'This could be the end of me', as he put it to one friend. When the Kosovars were liberated, it was likewise hailed as a vindication for Mr Blair. But the 'Kosovo lift' proved to be as transient as the 'Baghdad bounce' will probably be.
That war featured not at all in the election of 2001. In as much as it was a factor in the local elections which followed shortly after the end of the conflict, Kosovo was a negative. The voters sent Mr Blair a message that they wanted his energy focused on their domestic affairs. Labour scored an indifferent result at the locals. In the European elections the month after, they dealt Mr Blair his worst electoral result of his time at Number 10.
The war in Iraq does not ease the pressure to deliver on public services, nor does it offer any useful pointers about how to do so. Some in the Cabinet say that the moral is to increase the boldness quotient, to be more radical. That presumes that in every area it is self-evident and agreed what radicalism amounts to. Are university tuition fees radical? No, they are simply controversial, which is a different thing.
Just because Mr Blair has overridden his internal opponents about Iraq does not mean they will be less mutinous about his agenda for the public sector. It may incite them to be more rebellious, displacing their anger about the one into the arguments about the other. There will be more revolts over the likes of foundation hospitals, rows which will tend to conceal the biggest truth about public services, which is that improving them is a grinding slog in which victories cannot be achieved in lightning time and are never final.
Mr Blair will not have long to savour the spoils of war, such as they are. Already, he is summoned back to the toils of peace.
