The Tragedy of Tony Blair
Atlantic, The, June, 2004 by Geoffrey Wheatcroft
As the new year opened, Tony Blair faced the greatest crisis he had yet known in what were then the nearly seven years he had been Prime Minister, or as leader of the Labour Party: he marks (celebrates might not be quite the word) the tenth anniversary of his party leadership on July 21. Sorrows came not in single spies but in battalions, and there was serious talk as to whether he would survive to the end of January.
A double-barreled threat was posed by a critical vote in the House of Commons, on the seemingly esoteric but emblematic subject of university fees, and by the imminent publication of Lord Hutton's report on the events surrounding the death last summer of David Kelly, part of a ferocious quarrel between Downing Street (and particularly Blair's disreputable former press officer Alastair Campbell, who picked the quarrel and then adroitly resigned) and the ...