It was not a good day for Great Britain’s Prime Minister Tony Blair whose Labour Party took a beating in local elections — leading to predictions that the cabinet may be reshuffled…and even suggestions that it may be time for Blair to go:
Prime Minister Tony Blair’s Labour Party suffered losses in Britain’s local elections, indicating flagging voter support for his government after two weeks of damaging publicity surrounding ministers.
Labour lost control of eight councils, including Bury in Greater Manchester and Stoke-on-Trent in Staffordshire, the British Broadcasting Corp. said, citing incomplete results. The Conservatives gained control of councils in Shrewsbury & Atcham, Mole Valley and Bassetlaw. Blair may be prompted to reshuffle his cabinet as early as today, some ministers said.
“The headlines of the last two weeks have created a great problem for us,” Tessa Jowell, minister for culture, media and sport, said on Sky News. “They’ve created a great noise that’s made it difficult for our candidates to get elected.”
In the two weeks leading up to yesterday’s vote, Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott said he had an affair with his diary secretary, Home Secretary Charles Clarke apologized for freeing 1,023 foreign criminals who should have been considered for deportation and Health Secretary Patricia Hewitt was booed by union members protesting job cuts in the National Health Service.
But Bloomberg was more polite in its coverage than ITV which explained events this way:
Labour has suffered a drubbing in yesterday’s local council elections, with many backbenchers calling on Tony Blair to end speculation and name the day he will leave Downing St.
In the party’s worst electoral bloodbath since Mr Blair came to power, Labour is expected to have lost more than 250 councillors across England as well as control of more than a dozen town halls.
The disastrous results follow a turbulent two weeks for Labour, with many speculating John Prescott could publicly take the blame for Labour’s performance.
Mr Blair will oversee a cabinet reshuffle later and Home Secretary Charles Clarke’s position also looks unsafe following the foreign prisoners debacle.
But worryingly for Mr Blair, backbenchers are saying a reshuffle is not enough and that Labour needs to know when it will have a new leader.
Former health secretary Frank Dobson said the reshuffle would amount to no more than “rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic” and insisted the party needed “new management”.
Times Online’s coverage also underscores the fact that Blair is likely to come under increasing political fire:
Tony Blair will try to relaunch his battered Government today after suffering a drubbing in the local elections with heavy losses to the Conservatives in London.
He will reshuffle his Cabinet this morning in a desperate move to turn attention from what appeared to be his party’s worst local election showing since the late 1960s and his own worst night at the polls….
….It was a bad night for Labour, especially in the South, although not quite as bad as it had feared at the weekend, and Mr Blair will act today to defend his premiership and resist pressure on him to set a timetable for handing over to Gordon Brown.
Nick Brown, one of the Chancellor’s closest allies, said that urgent action was needed to reverse Labour’s “drift” and raised doubts over whether Mr Blair would be able to deliver it. “We can’t drift on,” he told the BBC. “It is pretty clear what has gone wrong and we need to address it.” Asked if Mr Blair could do it, the former Agriculture Minister replied: “I don’t know, but he has got to try.”
Indeed, Blair has faced a host of scandals. In that sense, there is something of a parallel with U.S. President George Bush who seems to see his administration enmeshed in a new controversy or scandal every week. One of the biggest scandals for Blair was the release of more than 1,000 foreign prisoners being released without deportation proceedings. That’s almost a competency issue.
As with Bush, you have to ask yourself: what can Blair do now to turn the political erosion around? And will his party have enough patience to allow him to remain to be the one to do it?
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.