Blair's Demarche Has Confronted Brown With His Ultimate Dilemma

For Tony Blair this is in all senses the moment of truth. First, it is literally true that his announced aim to stay as prime minister until shortly before the election after next is also his real and settled intention. Suspicions that Blair's announcement on Thursday was rushed or a ruse concealing some other intention - like an earlier or even a later departure - can be ruled out. Events may indeed wreck Blair's plan, but the plan is a real one, and he fully intends to carry it out.

For that reason this is also figuratively the moment of truth. For Blair has set the clock ticking. He now has a finite time in which to leave his imprint on our nation and on our times. Like an American president entering his second term, he increasingly contemplates his administration's legacy. His goals - whether in the Middle East, Europe, the public services, or constitutional reform, but above all in terms of lasting domestic political realignments - are serious and ambitious. He is now a man with a mission, and one who has never been more uncompromising about ensuring that he can finish the job.

The immediate effect of Blair's announcement is not to kill off speculation about the government's future. Speculation is what political journalists do. But the announcement will displace the speculation away from Blair and on to his potential successors. As a result, Labour politics will become a weird mix of American echoes - who will run in 2009? - and Soviet or Chinese ones - who is up and who is down in the jostling for the succession?

For that reason, the two key dates in the political medium term are Thursday May 5 2005, the post-Hartlepool hot favourite as the date of the next general election, and, even more, Friday May 6 2005, the day when Blair, if victorious, will sit down and make his new cabinet. The patronage powers of the prime minister will never be more charged with implication than on that day. To be a fly on the wall in Downing Street that Friday, above all when Blair talks to Gordon Brown, would be to possess the hottest political ticket of the decade.

Blair's announcement that he wants to stay - in effect until late 2008 or early 2009 - seems proof to me that the worm may have finally turned in the long TB-GB saga. Things have been building up to this for years, but particularly since the taunting semi-insurrection of Brown's "at our best when we are Labour" speech at the 2003 party conference. If Tom Bower's essential new biography of Brown is to be believed, this was the moment that Blair began to think his old ally would not succeed him.

It remains Blair's view, even now, that Brown would be his best qualified successor. But the last year, and recent weeks in particular, have strained that faith close to the limit. Blair believes that his repeated attempts to reach an accommodation with Brown over the past 12 months have been rebuffed too often. If Brown viewed the return of Alan Milburn to the cabinet as a hostile act - and he certainly did - then the mind can only boggle at how Thursday's announcement was received.

Brown's combination of pain and anger is palpable, dripped insistently into favoured ears. But the anger in Downing Street is palpable too. At every turn, they complain, the Treasury now seeks to block, weaken or even sabotage any policy initiative of which the chancellor does not himself have direct political ownership. On this reading, Blair's intended "policy-rich" conference speech this week ultimately contained too many announcements blunted and blurred by Brown's reflexive determination to keep his grip on issues that Blair sees as essential parts of the Labour legacy. Confronted with an interference that he sees not as ideological but as an assertion of Brown's power to disrupt, the iron has at last entered the prime minister's soul.

Three barriers stand between Blair and his dream of a vindicating third term. None of them should be underestimated. The first is the personal factor. Will the PM's health stand another four-and-a-half years of this? Only he and his doctor can really know the answer. All one can say is that the continuing ability to carry the pressures lightly is remarkable.

The second barrier is the general election. After Hartlepool, a consensus is solidifying, progressive and otherwise, that Labour will now win its third term. With the Labour vote holding up, albeit only after a fashion, the Tories alive yet prostrate, and the Lib Dems facing too big a mountain to climb, the scenario sharpens of a large Blair majority elected on a diminished Labour share of a low turnout. But this could go wrong. The combination of post-Iraq disaffection and post-Hartlepool complacency could be very destructive.

That leaves the final barrier, manned largely by the chancellor and his party. Will Brown try to stop Blair's plan? Can he? On past form, Brown will be bitterly tempted but will draw back, guided by caution, discipline and self-preservation. But the lessons of history illuminate the past, not the future. Every precedent exists until broken. And Blair's demarche confronts Brown with his ultimate dilemma.