To many people watching, it is a risible ritual to celebrate a union which no one believes in. I refer not to the wedding of Charles and Camilla -- they do at least appear to love each other. I mean Monday night's party political broadcast, directed by Anthony Minghella, for the British Labour party, which will depict Prime Minister Tony Blair and Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown as the fondest and most fecund of political couplings.
Productive their partnership has been. It has been one of the most durable and formidable combinations of prime minister and chancellor in history. What it has not been is harmonious.
The great poison which has flowed through the veins of the relationship makes it the more instructive that Blair is giving co-star status to his old friend turned mortal foe in the first broadcast of Labour's campaign. One thing this tells us is that Michael Howard, the leader of the right-wing Conservative party, is wrong to claim that Blair is already smiling to himself that a third term is in the bag. I suspect that the reverse is the case, and not only because the leader of the opposition has been easily outsmirking the prime minister. If Blair has a closet emotion about this election, it is a fear that he could be humiliated.
From the moment that he came out on to Downing Street to make his edgily staccato declaration of the beginning of the official campaign, he has come across as anything but a man swaggering to an easy victory. He has been visibly ratty about his inability to get the media to follow his agenda. He was badly smacked about by Howard at their last bout of parliamentary mouth-to-mouth combat before polling day.
Nervous nellie
Tony Blair has always been a bit of a nervous Nellie about elections. The big beneficiary of his anxieties has turned out to be Gordon Brown. Had things gone to the prime minister's original plan, I very much doubt the chancellor would have shared the limelight with him in Monday's broadcast. Last autumn, Blair finally decided that he had had enough of sharing ownership of the government with his chancellor. He wanted to spend his remaining time in Number 10 Downing Street as sole proprietor of a Blair government rather than co-executive of a Blair-Brown government. The most dramatic manifestation of this was his sidelining of the chancellor from election planning in an act of aggression described by one of Brown's allies as "an African coup." Since then, the two men have been engaged in a game of chicken.
Both know that they are best served by Labour winning as thumping a victory as possible at this election. The loss of the government's majority would surely be curtains for Blair. A small majority would not be that much better, because it would have everyone saying that he had foolishly overstayed his welcome. He wants a decent majority for the historical record and to give him a chance of doing something meaningful before he leaves Number 10.
Brown's dreams also require a healthy Labour majority. While some of his more short-termist admirers among members of parliament and the media want a savaged Labour majority in order to accelerate Blair's retirement, Brown's calculations have been characteristically more strategic. If he makes it to Number 10, he does not want to be a here today, gone tomorrow prime minister. He will want to win a fourth election victory, a feat achieved only once before -- by the Tories between 1979 and 1997 -- in modern times. To enhance his prospects of winning a fourth term for Labour in 2009 or 2010, he needs the best possible victory at this election.
This mutual interest in a handsome Labour win means it always made sense for them to come to terms. The question was on whose terms.
Who would blink first? The blinker has been Blair. First, Brown has got the campaign that he always wanted. It is now being fought his way, which is to make spending on public services and the performance of the economy the dividing line between the government and the Tories. This means that Labour is now fighting much the same campaign as it did four years ago.
This is precisely not the campaign that Blair originally planned to fight. He subsequently regretted taking a safety-first approach in 2001 and found it even less appealing as a strategy for this year.
Until recently, Blair was privately telling allies that another Brownite campaign wasn't the best way to maximize their prospects because the electorate wasn't in a mood to hear that the answer to public services was to throw even more money at them.
He brought in Alan Milburn, the latest in a long list of people to get their vitals crunched between Blair and Brown, because Blair wanted a third win to be a victory which unambiguously belonged to him and was a mandate for radical reform of health and education.
Weaknesses
As soon as he accepted that his weaknesses in other areas meant that the economy would have to be a centerpiece after all, Blair was going to have to concede the next thing Brown wanted.
How could Blair get through an election campaign bragging that the economy was tremendous without saying whether or not Brown would get the boot or not? The answer is that he couldn't.
So at their news conference together last week, Blair had to as good as declare that Brown would be staying at the Treasury if Labour won the election. He did not say it completely straightforwardly, on the grounds that "protocol" prevented him from doing so. In truth, there is nothing in the Constitution that stops a prime minister from making unambiguous statements about the future shape of his Cabinet if he wants to. What that guff about protocol reflects is Blair's divided feelings about being forced into making this declaration.
I recently asked a close ally of Brown how he could be expected to react when Blair finally tells him that he is leaving Downing Street. According to this friend, he would respond by saying: "Get your stuff out of my fucking flat."
He has licensed his acolytes to brief that Blair has repeatedly reneged on promises to hand over the throne. Blair has regularly and bitterly complained to his friends about Brown's treacherous maneuvers and hobbling of his ambitions.
The idea that Gordon Brown might be sent to the Foreign Office, a prospect that Brown regarded with as much enthusiasm as a posting to a salt mine in Siberia, wasn't just mischievous spinning by provocative Downing Street aides. It was regarded as a deadly serious threat.
Blair had gambled that he could cajole Brown on board for the election campaign without having to give a pledge not to move him. Playing hard to get has worked for Brown. He called the bluff. He has now got the guarantee -- in public, in front of witnesses -- that he wanted.
Blair's allies now contend that there is a lot to recommend this. If the economy turns sour after the election or if a black hole in the public finances so often predicted by commentators finally does materialize, it makes sense to have a hugely experienced chancellor to deal with the difficulties. If you want to be malicious about it -- and some Blairites do -- Brown would have to clear up after himself. Then there is the referendum on the European constitution. That will be hard enough to win without the additional handicap of a glowering ex-chancellor radiating dissent from sulky semi-exile.
Frustrations
All true enough. But what this also means for Blair is that his final term will be a continuation of the frustrations of the previous two terms. It will mean more double-headed government. This will carry on being, in the words of one of Blair's friends, "government by perpetual negotiation."
Which brings us to the third thing that Brown wants from Blair: an early date for his succession. Some of Brown's friends say Brown has become a shade more relaxed about this.
"Gordon has realized no one else can beat him," one ally said.
The promise that he will remain as chancellor is certainly a huge blow to anyone in the Cabinet fancying themselves as the Anyone But Gordon candidate. He will retain all the power provided by the Treasury to win friends and destroy rivals. The people most bitterly disappointed by this rapprochement are those who were hoping that Blair would make it less inevitable that the future has to be Brown.
This still leaves the chancellor impatient to get his hands on Number 10 sooner rather than later after the election.
According to a very senior Labour figure who talks frankly to both men: "Gordon will go mad if Tony makes him wait three years."
Blair's allies say that he has not done a deal about that. Only the two of them know if there is such a bargain.
Given their tortured history of departing from conversations with each other thinking the opposite about what has been agreed, they probably don't themselves know whether there is a deal unless it is written down and signed in blood.
So Gordon Brown finds himself working to put Tony Blair back into the job that he craves for himself. Blair finds himself having to accept that his remaining years in power will be spent shackled in cohabitation with Brown. This is not what either of them wanted. It is fortunate for Labour that the Blair-Brown dual monarchy seems to be a more popular form of government with the voters than it is with the couple who wear the crowns.
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