This week's defeat of his 90-day detention plan may be a defining moment for Tony Blair, writes Frank Millar, London Editor
'Blair's blackest day"; "The moment Tony Blair lost his authority"; "After eight years in power Tony Blair hears a new word: defeat". So screamed Thursday's headlines as the last layers of Teflon were stripped from a prime minister grown used to riding high above the mere party and parliamentary fray.
Blair's first Commons defeat was infinitely worse than he could ever have imagined. His 66-vote majority (more if you allow for five abstentionist Sinn Féin MPs) was not merely overcome - it lay buried under a Labour rebellion which saw a total of 60 Labour backbenchers defy their own prime minister on an issue he had told them was vital to the nation's security.
The stakes could not have been higher. Which is why, three days on, it can be argued that the damage inflicted upon Blair is even worse than it appeared in the excitable hours after Wednesday's vote. On the morning after, the cabinet assembled and did its duty, rallying behind the prime minister, asserting its collective wisdom in having pressed to the vote the doomed proposal to let police hold terror suspects for 90 days without charge. Unrepentant (as ever), Blair told them it was the MPs who were out of touch.
As health secretary Patricia Hewitt and others repeated the "business as usual" mantra, Blairite loyalists, home secretary Charles Clarke and defence secretary John Reid excelled themselves in defence of their leader. Clarke insisted it was he, not the prime minister, who had been at fault in deciding to push ahead with the 90 day proposal - only realising 30 minutes before the vote that he could not carry the day. Reid, meanwhile, carried the argument back to the Conservatives - telling Tory leadership hopefuls David Davis and David Cameron they had "crippled themselves" politically by putting themselves on "the wrong side" of a debate about national security - while asserting that Blair's authority was actually thus enhanced by Wednesday's defeat.
A (surely privately thrilled) Chancellor Gordon Brown also joined in the affirmations of unity, speaking from his resumed visit to the Middle East (a tour which only served to reinforce the impression of a prime minister-in-not-so-patient-waiting). He too, he said, was astonished to find the Conservatives openly rejecting powers wanted by the police and those in the frontline of the fight against international terror.
Even in the aftermath of this staggering defeat, it does not seem to have occurred to Blair or his ministers that they deployed a very foolish argument in the defence of their 90 day proposal - namely that it had to be because this was what the police wanted. After Metropolitan Commissioner Sir Ian Blair told a Parliamentary Press Gallery lunch on Tuesday that there was no particular "magic" about 90 days, departing Tory leader Michael Howard suggested the logic of the police argument might be that there should be no limit at all on the period of detention.
Blair, meanwhile, affected horror at the suggestion of an emerging "police state". However, the Tory MP who barracked him was undoubtedly reflecting an instinctive and widespread unease at the impression that it had suddenly become for the police to decide what the law should be and what powers they should have.
No matter: like the rest of his colleagues, the chancellor appeared happy, in characteristic New Labour fashion, to look "forward not back". It was, he reminded people, just six months since Blair had won a third mandate on a manifesto unanimously endorsed by the whole cabinet. And under Blair's leadership (though he did not venture for how long) Brown vowed ministers would proceed with their vital tasks in managing the economy and further reforming Britain's public services, while tackling the problems of global security.
BY THIS WEEKEND, much of the media will also be moving on - looking back only to speculate as to what Wednesday's vote means in terms of the future battles ahead over health and education, pension and welfare reform. Will Blair now finally "listen", as he claimed he had learned to do during a difficult election campaign fought out on the central issue of "trust"? Will someone such as Glenda Jackson step forward as a "stalking horse" challenger, hoping to persuade Blair he cannot realistically hope to fulfil his ambition and serve a "full" third term in power? Can he secure his "legacy" and an orderly and successful handover to Gordon Brown? Or will arrogance and personal ambition spell a necessarily unhappy end over the next year or two, with Labour re-acquiring its old reputation for factionalism and division, damaging the fourth-term prospects of Brown or whoever else might come after?
No one - including Blair himself - can know the circumstances in which he will finally depart the stage. Yet from this vantage point it seems a reasonable bet that the final stages of his premiership will play out messily, in a manner as unsatisfactory to Blair as to the Labour Party. And not because of last Wednesday's Commons defeat - rather because of that decision to announce before the May general election that he would not seek a fourth term. This was the real "beginning of the end", the first massive step on the way to becoming a "lame duck" prime minister, the guarantor of the gradual seepage of authority which, once lost, can never really be recovered.
SOME LABOUR INSIDERS think the smart thing would be for the prime minister to signal his intention to go in May 2007, at the end of 10 years in power (the point at which Margaret Thatcher might also have departed gracefully). And the Labour Party generally would relax if it thought Blair had entered a private understanding with the chancellor to that effect. The fear is that he will be driven on in search of that "legacy" because he does not want to go down in history simply as a big-time election winner who otherwise largely failed to shift the political landscape.
To which must be added the belief of many, inside and outside the Labour Party, that - even if Blair proved capable of doing a Thatcher - it is the Iraq war in any event which will define his premiership. And it is the direct line that can be drawn between the war and Wednesday's vote which persuades some at least that Blair should actually go now.
Labour MPs may find Blair's domestic agenda of more consuming interest. Yet by Blair's own estimate, MPs will never be called upon to vote on any issue more important than that on which they rejected him on Wednesday. Any alternative to 90 days, he said, would involve "a compromise with this nation's security". It was, as he told them, an issue which went to the core of government's most fundamental duty - to protect and defend the citizen.
Yet such is the scale of distrust of Blair generated by the war that the Conservatives calculated they could indeed ignore their own past record, play politics, and defy him, so enabling the Labour rebels to bring him low.
Blair may content himself that this was a failure of their leadership too. However, the essential facts are these. There is "out there" a new and unprecedented threat from "terrorism without limit".
There was a case (not properly argued) for a radical departure in the time for holding suspects without charge, given the complexities of gathering evidence against terrorists operating on a global stage. Yet on an issue literally of life and death, as he himself would have it, Blair could not prevail. It is hard to see how any future failure can quite compare with that.