With Labor's Reduced Majority, His Efficacy, Tenure in Question
By Glenn Frankel and Dan Balz
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, May 7, 2005
LONDON, May 6 -- After paying the ritual post-election visit to Buckingham Palace on Friday, British Prime Minister Tony Blair began his third term in office as politicians and analysts warned that his party's sharply reduced parliamentary majority would make it difficult for him to govern effectively and could speed his departure from the seat of power.
Blair, whose Labor Party lost seats largely because of voters' anger over Britain's participation in the war in Iraq, pledged that he would heed the public's message and concentrate on domestic concerns. Analysts predicted that British leaders would feel compelled to chart a more independent course from the United States for the foreseeable future.
"The chances of British participation in an Iraq-style military campaign led by the Americans anytime soon are virtually zero," said Michael Clarke, director of the International Policy Institute at King's College London. "A joint relief operation in Darfur might be possible," he said, referring to the war-racked region of western Sudan, "but anything against Iran or Syria is off the radar."
A subdued and unsmiling Blair spoke to reporters outside his Downing Street office after returning from the palace, where he received permission from Queen Elizabeth II to form a new government. He promised "to focus relentlessly now on the priorities that the people have set for us."
"The great thing about an election is that you go out and you talk to people for week upon week," he said. "And I've listened, and I've learned."
Later, Blair announced a new cabinet. David Blunkett, a close ally who resigned as home secretary last year over claims that he improperly helped get a visa for a lover's nanny, is returning as secretary of state for work and pensions. Gordon Brown, Blair's longtime political partner and Labor Party rival, remains in his post as chancellor of the exchequer, the most powerful cabinet position.
Blair's main opponent in the vote, Michael Howard, surprised supporters by announcing he would resign as leader of the Conservatives after the party has a chance to reform its selection procedure. Howard, who is 63, said he believed he would be too old to lead the party in the next election four or five years from now.
"Today the Conservative Party can hold its head up high," Howard told party activists in London. "We've begun the process of rebuilding our party."
Each of Britain's three main parties took comfort from aspects of the final electoral tally, but each fell short of its goals. Near-final results showed Labor with a 66-seat majority in the 646-member House of Commons, down from the 167-seat majority it won in the 2001 election. Labor's share of the vote nationwide fell to 36 percent -- five points below its 2001 total.
The Conservatives gained 33 seats, but only won 33 percent of the vote -- up less than one percentage point from 2001 -- and Howard told supporters he was disappointed he had not done better. The Liberal Democrats, the only major party to oppose the war, gained 5 percentage points to 23 percent nationally but won only 11 additional seats.
While most democratic governments would bask in Labor's majority, analysts said Blair, who enjoyed a landslide victory in 1997 as well as 2001, would have a hard time governing his House of Commons colleagues.
"In the past, he's been very bad at paying attention to the wishes and concerns of the parliamentary party," said Philip Cowley, an expert in parliamentary politics at the University of Nottingham. "He's got a perfectly adequate majority if he can learn to govern differently, but I don't think he can do it. It's not in his DNA."
Blair has pledged to pursue an aggressive domestic agenda, including the introduction of national identity cards to combat terrorism, new controls on immigration, pension reforms and further private involvement in Britain's schools and health service. All those initiatives are likely to be opposed by many members of his party. He is also committed to holding a referendum seeking approval of a proposed European Union constitution that opinion polls suggest will be defeated.
If Blair's agenda stalls, analysts say, pressure would grow to hand off the leadership to Brown quickly. Some of Brown's supporters were hinting broadly on Friday that Blair should step down, noting that the prime minister had declared before the campaign that a third term would be his last.
"I think he's got to consider what message comes out of this," said Robin Cook, who resigned as foreign secretary over the war in 2003. "He's got to consider very carefully to what extent he can leave both the party and the nation guessing when exactly he might go," Cook told the BBC.
Brown played loyal partner to Blair during the campaign, going so far as to say he would have handled Iraq exactly as Blair had. Brown's allies said the chancellor's stewardship of the economy had helped prevent an even larger defection on Thursday. "I think Brown was a gateway through which people could come back to Labor," said Bob Shrum, a veteran U.S. strategist and longtime friend of Brown's.
In a victory speech in his parliamentary district, Brown made no mention of wanting to replace Blair. "I promise that we will listen and we will learn so that we can serve our country and our communities even better in the years to come," he said.
Although Brown has been as sympathetic to the United States as Blair has been over the years, analysts said that if he became prime minister he would pay more heed than Blair to the core Labor Party voters who have been alarmed and angered by the alliance with the Bush administration.
"The Labor Party members who prefer Brown to Blair hope Brown would not subjugate British foreign policy to George Bush," said Charles Grant, director of the Center for European Reform. "Other things being equal, Brown would want to be a good ally of the Americans. But he would care more about what the party thinks."
"What Brown won't do is express his Atlanticism by writing a blank check on American military operations in the way that Blair evidently did in 2002," said Clarke, the International Policy Institute head.
Labor Party strategists said a storm over leaked government documents had cost the party crucial support in the final week of the campaign. The documents questioned the legality of the war in Iraq and suggested that Blair had told Bush privately as early as April 2002 that he would support an invasion. "We saw a pretty dramatic falloff," said Mark Penn, a U.S. strategist advising Blair. Penn said the campaign's internal polling had recorded a shift of two to three percentage points from Labor to the anti-war Liberal Democrats.
When it became apparent how serious the potential erosion was, Blair was forced to change the subject from the healthy economy and other achievements of his government to a warning to Labor voters angry about Iraq that they risked bringing in a Conservative government if they cast protest votes. "It stopped us from talking about other things," a senior party strategist said.
One casualty Thursday was Oona King, a Blair loyalist who lost her seat in an East London district with many Muslim voters to George Galloway, a Labor rebel who ran as an independent. "Mr. Blair, this is for Iraq," Galloway declared as the totals were announced. "All the people you killed, all the lies you told, have come back to haunt you."
In another upset, David Trimble, the Protestant moderate who won a Nobel Peace Prize in 1998 for his work to end the sectarian conflict in Northern Ireland, lost his seat to a candidate from the hard-line Democratic Unionist Party. Voters have moved away from moderates on both sides of the Protestant-Catholic divide in recent years.