The long goodbye

Politics and leadership should have one overriding experience which all aspiring leaders should recognise – when it is time to call it a day.

It is better to go, rather than be deposed; and it is better to control one’s exit rather than have circumstances forced upon you. Tony Blair has failed – and failed spectacularly – in seeing this coming, and then failing to deal with the inevitable.

I remember the joy as Thatcher left No 10, although her handling of her final departure was magnificent, but the slow poison destroying her Premiership was there for all to see. Except her.

Tony Blair has it much worse, with him clutching the viper in No 11 warmly to his bosom; albeit with his hands around Gordon’s throat. The car crash is inevitable, and today’s announcement has only focussed everyone’s eyes on the accident blackspot. It is with some disbelief that I see a politician who seemed to be so at ease with the machinations of the media and his own back-benchers unable to see or stop his inevitable demise.

Bambi is truly caught in the spotlights of an oncoming lorry.

But it is easy to criticise, more difficult to say what should have been done. I think that the minute he made it clear that he would stand down in the third term, he was fatally wounded, and the time horizon was inevitably being redrawn closer and closer as Brown closes in. Instead of planning a glorious finale tour of the UK, his aides would have been better to plan a prolonged hand-over and exit starting at the coming Party Conference. A clear announcement that the Annual Conference would serve as the launch pad for the election would have left Tony with all the candidates praising him to high heaven as he said farewell, whilst leaving him in charge (or joint charge) for perhaps another six to nine months. He would have tied the winner into his manifesto, and ensured that he went in the best possible manner.

Instead, Conference is going to be a bloodbath of backstabbing and Tony being forced to confront his political mortality, whilst desperately trying to stop the coronation of Brown.

Thankfully, I don’t belong to a political party that behaves in such a way (joke!).