CLOSE, BUT NO CIGAR

When Blair stood on the brink (Patrick Wintour, April 26, 2003,The Guardian)

Senior cabinet ministers at the centre of Tony Blair's war strategy were braced to quit along with the prime minister in the run-up to the Commons vote on Iraq, the Guardian can reveal.

Jack Straw, the foreign secretary, told the Guardian that he intended to resign if the vote went against the government. The home secretary, David Blunkett, also said that cabinet ministers close to Mr Blair would "go down with him". The prime minister revealed last week that he had told his family he might be forced to quit over Iraq.

In an interview with the Guardian as part of a special investigation into the build-up to war, Mr Blunkett recalled: "Everyone believed, in the run-up to that vote, that Tony had put his premiership on the line and those who are very close to him would go down with him. I thought it would be a hit on the government as a whole."

Mr Straw said: "The projected voting figures were very serious ... I knew there would be a point at which Tony would resign and I would resign as well. I told my wife I might well have to go over this. I think Tony assumed that I would go."

The revelations show how perilous the government's position became during the build-up to war. At one point, Labour whips told Mr Blair that up to 200 Labour MPs would vote against the government, and frantic last-minute efforts were made to persuade rebels back on side.

According to one cabinet source, the entire cabinet could technically have been forced to tender their resignation. "If the prime minister resigns, the whole government resigns. Everybody's portfolios and talents would be put into the hands of the new leader."

In the last desperate 24 hours before the vote, the government essentially ground to a halt as the energies of Mr Blair and other leading cabinet figures were devoted to winning over potential rebels.

Mr Straw recalled: "We used every argument, including telling them that this is no longer about what you say to your local paper, this is about whether you want to keep this government in business."

The defence secretary, Geoff Hoon, warned his US counterpart, Donald Rumsfeld, about the possible consequences of the vote. He told the Guardian: "I had a long conversation with him, warning him that if the vote went wrong we might not be able to be there. I did not want him or anyone on the US side not to understand the significance of where we were on the importance of the parliamentary vote. The US came to understand it was about us gambling just about everything in getting this right."

He added: "If we had lost that vote, that would have been it."

Since for five years now we've been predicting that Tony Blair would intentionally break the Labour Party to establish a genuine third way in Britain, we find it damned annoying that the rest of the Party realized they're nothing without him. Oh well, maybe next war. Posted by Orrin Judd at April 26, 2003 5:04 PM