YOU MEAN YOU JUST SCAN THE GROCERIES?:

Blair forced to back down over health service targets (JAMES KIRKUP, 4/30/05, The Scotsman)

AN "OUT of touch" Tony Blair was forced into a public retreat yesterday over government health and education targets, an embarrassment that came as Labour members predicted he will quit sooner rather than later.

Labour was thrown on to the defensive by Mr Blair’s appearance on BBC’s Question Time on Thursday night, when he admitted he was "absolutely astonished" by suggestions that some English NHS patients can only book a doctor’s appointment at 48 hours’ notice, so that GPs can meet central government targets.

The Prime Minister’s incredulity gave the Conservatives a perfect opportunity to produce a welter of evidence of misfiring targets and, more damagingly, proof that the government had been well aware of the problem. [...]

[B]y the afternoon, the growing row forced Mr Blair into a public apology over central targets in health and education.

"There is danger that they have been too crude," he told BBC television. "We have to have them, but [need to] make them more flexible. We need to strip the targets down."

Mr Blair’s faltering performance over health yesterday came as members of his own party publicly speculated that he will fail to see through his promise to serve a full third term if re-elected.

Bob Marshall-Andrews, a veteran Labour backbench rebel, suggested Mr Blair could even face a leadership challenge if he tries to stay on for more than a year after the election.

"I see absolutely no reason why that shouldn’t take place. Indeed, I suspect confidently that it will," he said in a Channel Four interview to be broadcast today.

Neil Kinnock, the former Labour leader, suggested that the Prime Minister will not seek to prolong his leadership "for the sake of it. "

"He’s not looking for a page in the history book; he’s got that in any case," Lord Kinnock said in a GM-TV interview to be broadcast tomorrow. "He’s not looking to extend the chapter for the sake of it."

Brown's luster rubs off on protégés (Graham Bowley, APRIL 30, 2005, International Herald Tribune)

In the vote Thursday, it seems a foregone conclusion that voters will return Tony Blair's Labour Party to government.

But since Blair's announcement, on the opening day of the campaign, that "at the election following there will be a different leader," speculation has raged about who could be his successor.

The widespread assumption is Gordon Brown.

But what should the world expect from a man who, despite establishing Britain as one of Europe's best-performing economies, has remained largely hidden by Blair's more charismatic shadow?

And what of the loyal coterie of young supporters who surround Brown - people like Ed Balls - and who are likely to rise with him?

Balls grew up in Nottingham, England, went to Oxford and Harvard, and started his career writing at The Financial Times before Brown hired him as an adviser in 1994.

When Brown took over the Treasury in 1997, Balls in effect became the deputy chancellor of the Exchequer, unelected but ruling over civil servants and British economic policy with notorious muscularity.

He drew up the memo that granted the Bank of England independence in setting interest rates. Brown and Balls set the tests that kept the British pound out of the euro. With Blair focusing on foreign policy, Brown and Balls decided how far free-market forces could invade Britain's public services.

Achieving so much, so young has made Balls "even more charming and self-deprecating" than his famously curt mentor Brown, says one former government colleague, ironically. [...]

One possible date for regime change is the referendum next spring on the European Union's constitutional treaty "because," according to Kampfner, "if Blair loses that, he is finished."

And what would Brown's policies be if he were prime minister?

"There is a moral element to Brown's approach to politics that derived from his father, who was a very hard-working minister in the Church of Scotland who devoted a lot of time to the unemployed," says Robert Peston, a British journalist and author of "Brown's Britain," a book about the chancellor.

On Iraq, most analysts believe Brown would probably have taken Britain to war, just as Blair did, but only after securing wider public backing. While instinctively pro-American, he has become increasingly skeptical about the EU, devotes scant time to visits to Brussels, and rarely mentions Germany and France without a lecture about reforming their stuttering economies.

Because the Third Way is a rejection of Labourism, Mr. Blair has only been popular in his party to the extent that he could win elections. It would be a delightful irony though if they chuck him over for Gordon Brown and get someone even more devoted to the same ideas.

Posted by Orrin Judd at April 30, 2005 9:26 AM