Blair's Zeal Was Not Enough

In his farewell speech to his party conference last October Tony Blair vowed to dedicate his final months in office to trying to secure peace in Palestine, promising to devote as much time and energy as he had used in seeking a solution in Northern Ireland.

Now with just over week to go before he leaves office, and with Palestine splintering, it is obvious that Mr Blair's efforts have failed. So had he been indulging in a piece of flamboyant conference rhetoric, or did he hit insurmountable problems?

Either way, the mood in No 10 is bleak. One of his advisers admits: "It has been a very depressing period."

Last December, Mr Blair travelled to the Middle East, including the West Bank and Jerusalem, at a time when Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, had been unable to get agreement on a national unity government with Hamas.

Mr Abbas had hoped such a deal would lift the EU's 15-month boycott of aid to the Palestinian government. Mr Blair's visit was designed to move things on. He had been hopeful that a deal could be struck with Palestinian moderates, and was not as rigid as the Americans about the preconditions.

He believed there were two Hamas movements: one radical Islamist and uncompromising, manipulated by the Syrians and the Iranians; and the other an internal Hamas leadership, led by Ismail Haniya, more willing to strike deals and aware its election was due to revulsion with Fatah corruption. But the Americans were not interested in dealing with Hamas.

Mr Blair could not budge them. Condoleezza Rice, the US secretary of state, travelled to the Middle East twice and started to hint that a less rigid approach to the road map could be possible.

But in February the Saudis brokered a deal in Mecca finally forming a national unity government. A British official close to the deal said: "We could never get enough buy-in for [national unity government] from the Americans and from Israel. It was a step forward and we could have started to make progress."

As one Blair aide said: "There is no future in a Hamas land and a Fatah land. You cannot ignore 1.5 million people in Gaza. They have to be reunited, and there is no guarantee that Fatah's security force will survive against Hamas."