Blair's Pre-announced Resignation Can't Sure-up His Future Ability to Govern

If there is one manoeuvre at which Tony Blair is particularly skilled, it's the feint. He turns his back on the euro? He makes "the most passionately pro-European speech of his career". He dumps on Gordon? He praises Gordon in his conference speech. He brings back Alan Milburn? He drops the term New Labour. Actually, this is more than a manoeuvre, it is one of the prime minister's most basic political instincts. It has become his way of life.

And there has never been a more perfect example of it than this week's revelations about his future. On the one hand, signs of mortality - the heart operation and the expensive house for his post-Downing Street life. On the other, instinct kicking in, the firm announcement that he's going nowhere, for five years or so at least.

So the first question is whether that political bombshell - the promise of him serving a full third term if elected - means anything at all? Imagine what the headlines would have been like had he not said it. The heart flutter, the house, the mayhem in Iraq, the narrow squeak at Hartlepool (and I bet he was being advised before his 10pm broadcasts that he could lose it) and a conference dominated in the media by continued headlines about splits and briefings ... everyone would have been preparing his political obituaries.

The Tories were preparing a "vote Blair, get Brown" attack. So given that Blair had to say he was staying, was he really saying anything worth listening to at all?

The next question is the common-sense one: how can he have any idea about how long he will stay? He was punctilious about repeating in his interviews that it was up to the British people. But it isn't as simple as that.

Labour is still the huge, overwhelming favourite to win the next general election. No one really thinks they won't all still be securely in power by next summer. The only alternative government now is a Tory one, and the Tories, as Hartlepool showed, are out of the game. But Labour's majority? That's an entirely different matter.

A Lib-Dem surge, which everybody expects, makes the calculations difficult. In some places it will help Tories, in a very few seats it will help Labour. But mostly it's bad news for Blair, and the size of the majority will have a crucial effect on the politics after 2005. If it's only say, 40 to 60 seats, it will mean Blair has lost dozens of loyal backbenchers. He will find himself depending on disaffected ex-ministers, leftwing MPs and rebels. He will therefore have to cut back on his most radical market-mimicking ideas (not that the super-loyal Blairites offered a coherent view of what their "radical" manifesto would consist of at conference). And Blair will be more vulnerable to hostility from the Brownites, not less so. It seems he has realised this and, like the supreme tactician he is, prepared for it by rowing back to a more traditional Labour agenda and rhetoric at Brighton.

But if that happens, will he enjoy it? He's gone through at least one long, dark night of the soul before, so why wouldn't he be plunged in gloom if he found himself hemmed in after the election?

The global stage won't offer an escape from mutinous backbenchers. Africa and global warming are genuine enthusiasms, but they are unlikely to dominate his life. It will be more Iraq, and more war on terror. If Bush is re-elected, can Blair really be so confident of that revived Middle East peace process we heard about this week?

Yes, there are a lot of what-if thoughts in those last few paragraphs. But that's my point. Blair is likely to be able to stay in office after the election. His ability to govern in an effective, popular way is much less predictable. It depends on outside events, and his own authority.

What is clear is that his announcement will provoke ferocious jostling from now on. People are already doing the calculations. A four-year term is now considered "full", so to allow time for a succession we are probably talking about Blair going at the very latest by the winter or early spring of 2008-09. From now until then, half a dozen ministers will be plotting where they want to be, job by job, to gain maximum exposure. They will be wooing the party. There will be briefings by unacknowledged "campaign managers" who expect plum jobs if their man, or woman, wins. None of this will help the government's - or Blair's - authority. Blair could begin to look like a lame duck rather earlier than anyone might have expected.

Meanwhile, what happens to Brown? He advised against a pre-announced resignation date when he thought it would merely cause difficulties for a few months, but this is infinitely worse. Is he really expected to stay at the Treasury for another five years, grinding out budgets? But the Foreign Office would be a demotion and he would be unlikely to take it. Yet again, could Blair with a smaller majority afford to have Brown, alongside Robin Cook, on the backbenches?

So we should listen to Blair's words about the third term without taking them at face value. The house is real, the heart operation is real ... and the rest is mere assertion about the unknowable future. We all have intentions. But as the prime minister knows very well, fate is full of surprises.