Post-LPC leadership prognosis - Tony Blair

How long can Tony Blair carry on as Labour leader?

Barring the long-shot possibility of a National Government with the Tories, it will probably be late Spring or summer '07. The May local election and Scottish election results will be a king-size disaster, whoever is leader, and it would actually be quite a good strategy to let Blair take the flak and then give up a day or a week afterwards. The only problem is that this isn't the kind of way he'll want it to end after 10 years, and so he may be tempted to hang on a bit longer to put some space between him and those May election results. So maybe July? I think the Gordon Brown camp would be quite pissed off about this as the leadership election would not be over and done until September, which is really close to the 2007 conference.

So maybe TB will go before May... but this means that Gordon Brown (or whoever) walks into electoral disaster in the first few weeks of his premiership (normally I'd say "his/her" but there don't seem to be any realistic female contenders at this stage). A compromise position would be for Blair to resign in March or April, get the leadership process in motion, and then blame the bad election results on the party being (temporarily) leaderless. Actually a useful cop-out, and perhaps a likely scenario... except that Blair may like the idea of celebrating "10 years at Number 10" and may hang on for sheer vanity value.

Blair's conference speech was certainly well received (although I had some issues with the content, as always) and may have given him a little more breathing space. But surely it's unlikely that he's going to be able to make a positive difference in Israel/Palestine in the next 9 months if he hasn't done in the last 9 years. And he is only a bit part player anyway... if George Bush really had been serious about "the Roadmap", if anyone in his administration knew what the goddamn
Roadmap was, then maybe a separate Palestinian state would be well on the way. As it is, the US Government has certain other foreign policy engagements on its mind right now, and the mid-term elections will probably accentuate that, particularly if the Democrats manage to capture the House and/or Senate.

On balance I think Blair will go in May 2007, with the new leader in place by the end of July.