Blair's future on the line


By Nick Assinder
BBC News Online political correspondent

He is about to go to war with Saddam Hussein under the worst of all possible
conditions.
After deploying all his powers of persuasion and expressing his confidence
he would win the day both at home and in the world, he has failed. There is
no second UN resolution and he has started losing ministers. So the prime
minister now faces the greatest backbench rebellion not only of his
premiership, but probably in recent political history. There will be a
Commons vote on the issue on Tuesday where his rebels will express their
dismay that military action is being launched without a further UN
resolution.

Tory support

And the prime minister now faces the real prospect that he will lose the
majority on his own backbenches.

If 165 of his own MPs refuse to back him, and once the so-called payroll
vote is taken out of the equation, he will be relying on the Tories to give
him Parliamentary support for his action. He saw 122 defy him in the last
vote and the rebels are claiming as many as 40 or 50 others will join them
this time. That is dangerously close to a majority. Presumably he simply
wants to get this over and done with and get on with the task in hand. And
that task will be undertaken even if he loses the support of his own MPs.

But no matter how the arithmetic finally adds up, or even when the vote
comes, no one will be under any doubt that the prime minister will be acting
against the wishes of a huge section, probably a majority, of his own party.
It is hard to overstate just how far that will inflame the backbench anger
at his actions.

Political truce

There has always been a hard core of Labour MPs deeply opposed to his
leadership. But this revolt goes far wider than the usual suspects. And many
of those rebels are as personally committed to their positions as the prime
minister is to his.

They are likely to rally around Commons leader Robin Cook now he has
resigned from the cabinet. Meanwhile, the Tories will not publicly crow
about it, but make no mistake, once the war is over they will privately use
the fact Tony Blair relied on them as a stick with which to beat him.

Also, once the temporary political truce imposed by the war is over, there
will almost certainly be attempts to force a leadership challenge. Even if
the prime minister is proved right in his claims about Saddam's weapons of
mass destruction and terrorist links, some will still want a challenge as a
result of his actions.

So it is not impossible that the prime minister emerges from the war
vindicated, but still under threat from his own MPs. Under those
circumstances the leadership challenges would almost certainly come to
nothing. But he will have become dangerously detached from his party. If the
war goes badly - and there are always a thousand ways such action can go
wrong - he may be one of the casualties.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/2856251.stm