WASHINGTON, April 9 (UPI) -- With the sudden shock of an unexpected thunderstorm, a large and jagged obstacle has thrust its way across what had looked to be a smooth succession from Tony Blair to Gordon Brown as Britain's next prime minister.
Senior ministers are at each other's throats and challenges are threatened, as the Labor government and its nervous Members of Parliament reeled Sunday under the impact of a new opinion poll suggesting that more than half of British voters thought Brown was unfit to lead the country.
The Sunday Times said only 27 percent of 2,218 people questioned in a YouGov poll thought Brown was fit to be prime minister after ugly headlines all last week over his handling of pensions. A clear majority of 57 percent of respondents thought him unfit, and the poll showed the opposition Conservatives beating Labor at the next election by 8 percentage points.
Time is getting short for the succession. Blair has promised colleagues that he will resign this summer, after 10 years in office. Most observers expect Blair to enjoy his farewells at the next European Union summit and the next G8 summit in June, and then to retire.
But if the Labor Party is threatened with civil war over his succession, Blair could be persuaded to remain in the job he still enjoys. Although Blair's own approval ratings are low and polls suggest that he would face defeat at the next election, they are significantly better than Brown's.
The voters will be giving their own verdict next month, in local and regional government elections that threaten to be a disaster for Labor, which looks likely to lose control of the Scottish National Assembly, once the party's strongest heartland and the home base of Gordon Brown.
Brown's succession seemed assured until three weeks ago, when he presented his 11th budget, the annual ritual at which Brown has usually shown his mastery of the British economy, which has now grown in each quarter for the last 15 years. This unprecedented record has taken Britain's economy surging past France, and with a higher per capita GDP than Germany.
This should be a proud record for Brown to campaign on. But on the day of the budget, the former secretary to the Cabinet, top British civil servant Lord Turnbull, gave an extraordinary interview to the Financial Times in which he described Brown as a "Stalinist" control freak. And the budget itself, with 2 pence off the standard rate of income tax, should have been a triumph, but economic commentators have grown accustomed to Brown's cunning way of raising "stealth" taxes to make up for nominal tax cuts, and the budget did him little good.
Last week the storm worsened when a Freedom of Information Act inquiry by a newspaper unearthed the civil service documents on one of Brown's earliest and most controversial decisions, to remove the tax relief on private pension schemes. It may have brought in an extra $180 billion in revenues for the government over 10 years, but it battered the pension industry and left many recently retired people significantly worse off. And the newly discovered documents showed that the civil service had warned Brown that this would happen.
"Britain faces being a nation of impoverished pensioners," was the headline in The Times, and Brown's reputation for financial skill has nose-dived.
A dour and brooding Scot who has been sullenly waiting for Blair's long-promised succession, Brown is not a man to whom the voters warm. With complete control over the national purse strings as chancellor of the exchequer, he has run an alternative government and dominated domestic policy. Relations between Brown and Blair -- and their respective loyalists -- have been poisonous for years. And Brown's image as a "Stalinist" looter of the pensioners has given his enemies the opportunity to mount a challenge. Their favored candidate is the able and youthful (41) Environment Secretary David Miliband, who has so far shrunk from the battle, probably fearing Brown's terrible vengeance. Ironically, Miliband has a brother who is one of the stalwarts of Brown's private office at his power base in the Treasury.
The powerful Home Secretary John Reid, 59, is now said to be preparing to challenge Brown if Miliband ducks the fray. Many Labor heavyweights, like former Cabinet ministers Alan Milburn and Charles Clarke, would back anybody who opposed Brown. The key will be the hundreds of individual decisions to be made by Labor MPs, who must ask themselves whether they are more or less likely to keep their seats in Parliament with Brown at the helm, or with a fresh face like Miliband. Opinion polls suggest Brown is not a good bet for the next election -- but that election is at least two years away, a long time in politics. At the same time, voters tend not to support a party that is visibly at war with itself, and Labor's current appearance of internal disarray is evidently helping the Conservative opposition.
This all takes place within the context of the massively unpopular Iraq war and the widespread complaint, reinforced by the latest crisis with Iran, that Blair has been far too close to U.S. President George W. Bush for comfort. Blair spent most of his political capital on Iraq, with little to show for it, and after 10 years in office he looks much older, tired and without the fresh-faced bounce that made him so popular 10 years ago when he won his first of three successive election victories.
The clear beneficiary of Labor's internal battles is likely to be David Cameron, the inexperienced and lightweight but popular Conservative leader. A former media marketing executive, Cameron is so trend-conscious that he has a wind turbine attached to the roof of his London home and posed for photographers "saving energy" by bicycling to Parliament -- until a sharp-eyed reporter noted that he was followed by an official car bringing his documents.
Miliband, Brown's most likely challenger, is wisely out of the public view and away from the frenzied pack of political journalists, taking a family holiday "somewhere in France" while he makes the most important decision of his political career. Brown, by contrast, was in Scotland with Blair, where the two friends-turned-mortal-enemies put on a charade of party solidarity as they launched the Scottish election campaign.
