If Blair gets this wrong, he could be gone by Christmas Secret government polling has exposed the risks of the Bush embrace
Martin Kettle
Last month, unannounced and unreported, Tony Blair ordered a political operation that could have sweeping implications. Just how important could it be? Put it this way. Blair's handling of what he has now set in motion will determine whether 2002 will be his last summer holiday as prime minister.
Outside government, it is insufficiently understood just how much of the prime minister's time this spring was taken up with settling the three-year public spending review that was finally announced in July. But now another agenda is shaping. Blair has made little secret of the fact that August is when he wants to clear his decks and make decisions about the euro.
That is why he instructed his private pollster, Philip Gould, to conduct a secret survey last month. The survey covers, among other subjects, attitudes to the euro, the EU, the Conservatives and President George Bush. The results of the Downing Street poll, it is claimed, are extraordinary. Pro-European advisers are delighted that the poll has found that all senior Tory politicians are more unpopular than the euro. But the bigger news is that the poll has discovered on the eve of a possible attack on Iraq, that Bush is even more unpopular than the Tories.
These are findings with large implications. But the single most striking issue is the fact that such a poll was conducted at all. If nothing else, it is a reminder that successful modern politicians never make an important move without knowing how it plays with the voters - even when it involves the indelicacy of asking potentially embarrassing questions about your most important international ally.
As a politician, Blair is poll-aware rather than poll-driven. He has not reached American levels of poll-dependence yet. When Bill Clinton was running for re-election in 1996, he got his pollster Dick Morris to check out where he should take his summer vacation. The voters said they would prefer a president who holidayed with his family on a ranch in Wyoming rather than chilling with celebs on Martha's Vineyard. So the Clintons duly and improbably went to a Wyoming ranch.
But Blair didn't get where he is today by recklessly defying the public mood. He watches it attentively, as all politicians must. When the public told Gould they were worried about street crime and asylum seekers, for instance, Blair adjusted his game immediately. Few of Blair's important undertakings are conducted in ignorance of the polls. As his enthusiasm for the euro shows, though, he is not a blind follower of what they tell him.
So Blair's poll definitely tells us he has something big on his mind. That something is mainly Europe, about which he speaks in increasingly messianic terms. The poll is intended to supply some of the parameters for the upcoming campaign, so the questions about Bush's standing need to be seen partly in this context. Rightly or wrongly, Blair feels he must be perceived as a pro-American leader in order to protect his flank when the euro referendum debate begins in earnest, perhaps as soon as the autumn.
But the finding about Bush is dynamite in the developing context of Iraq. The asking of the question is proof that Downing Street is more worried than it has been letting on. The result is proof that it was right to be so. Many things follow from it.
If British voters have little confidence in Bush, as this and other surveys show, then any confidence they may have in Blair's own foreign policy judgments is likely to be undermined by his embrace of a disrespected president. If Blair is seen not just as a poodle, but as the poodle of a foolish and arrogant ally, he could find his political capital to do other things draining rapidly away. This poses questions that cannot be shirked by a prime minister who instinctively both wants to go to war with Iraq and to take Britain into the eurozone.
I suspect that Blair has only recently become properly aware of the domestic political dangers - never mind the international ones - that may await him if he misplays his hand on Iraq. His instinctive tendency to isolate himself from his own party, and a confidence in his own powers that sometimes borders on arrogance, have insulated him from the seriousness of the alarm coursing through much of middle Britain. But he knows what is going on now, and his own reported remarks on Iraq to King Abdullah of Jordan and the foreign office minister Mike O'Brien's comments in Libya yesterday both ring true.
The forces that could be ranged against him at home are becoming increasingly formidable. Approximately half of the non-payroll Labour vote in the House of Commons signed Alice Mahon's far from strident early-day motion on Iraq earlier this year; the signatories included significant senior figures such as Janet Anderson, Chris Smith and Gavin Strang, some of whom can be expected to speak out on the issue more trenchantly. Even in its current gelded state, the autumn party conference in Blackpool is likely to provide a focus for such discontents. The three daily newspapers generally most sympathetic to the government - the Guardian, the Independent and the Mirror - are all likely to oppose him too. And then there's Rowan Williams.
The scale of the cabinet's doubts also took Blair by surprise when they were voiced at a meeting in the spring. There is serious talk now of possible resignations in all ranks of the government if British troops are committed to a US attack without UN authorisation. Blair could probably withstand an isolated resignation, even from Clare Short. But if he lost Robin Cook as well, and conceivably even Jack Straw, then his own future at the head of the government could not be assured.
And if that, or even some of it, happened, then the goal that Blair cares about more than anything right now - joining the euro - would be in even greater jeopardy. In the past, Blair has gained strength from confronting his own party. But he cannot count on that happening now. Even a messy victory over his own party's opponents could be a pyrrhic one.
These facts seem so obvious - and must surely be so to Blair too - that there can now only be one of three outcomes: first, that Blair knows something that we don't, which will significantly transform the terms of the argument in his favour; second, that he has played a bluffer's hand and is beginning to back away from a commitment he does not intend to carry through; or, third, that he is genuinely set on supporting the US under whatever circumstances Bush decrees. The first is still possible. The second looks more likely than it once did. If it is the third, though, then Gordon Brown could be prime minister by Christmas.