Blair is feeling the heat

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Anyone who has observed the Prime Minister over time will have noticed that when he is feeling particularly cross, he comes over extremely polite. This was brought home to me years ago, during the creation of New Labour, when I watched him having his ankles snapped by some Labour activists on the subject of comprehensive education. The Labour leader was disarming, nonconfrontational and smooth in his reassurances about equality in schools. The audience scented treachery.

Afterwards, I muttered something about that having been a rough ride. His face tightened with a rage that had been carefully hidden for the previous hour. "F*****g Guardian readers," he said.

This mixture of anger and amiability is the key to Mr Blair's political style. He thrives on conflict, I suspect, because it allows him to deploy his most potent weapon of furious self-control. He will need it as challenges on three fronts lie before him this winter.

The threatened firefighters' strike, the difficulty of holding up support for an attack on Iraq when the US administration is sending out inconsistent messages about its intent and the concerns that the spending boom unleashed in the public services may coincide with an economic downturn, are not hurdles crossed lightly.

It does mean that the Prime Minister can seem to be a different Tony, depending on the problem he is confronted with. In his dealings with America, he has proven himself both loyal and useful as an ally. "Bush listens to a lot of European leaders on tactics when it comes to the war on terror or Iraq," says one former senior official. "But when it comes to strategy, he listens to Blair."

It is the sort of line the Prime Minister would like on his political headstone. It also explains why, given the floor in the Commons to defend his position on international affairs, Mr Blair is happy to come out as a fighting, conviction-driven interventionist, because that is the style that brings rewards and sustains his influence.

Domestically though, his instinct is the opposite. Abroad, he moves like a jungle predator: at home he proceeds sideways, like a crab. The imminent strike by the firefighters is an advanced test of his ability to scuttle through the dangers and outdefeatmanoeuvre his opponents. The gaps are very narrow, the crevices even deeper.

As Mr Blair takes his first flak from questions on the impending strike today at Westminster, prepare for an outbreak of extreme courtesy towards the firefighters. "This is not some chin-out, see-you-outside, Thatcherstyle ultimatum," said one senior Downing Street figure.

The word has gone out from Mr Blair in person that there are to be no rhetorical onslaughts addressed to the firefighters: no echoes of the "enemy within". If this is to be a nasty stand-off, it is a very Blairite variation: the politest of all possible disagreements. That, the Prime Minister has figured, will create a civil bond with the public against the unions.

Do not, however, mistake the air of calm in Downing Street for confidence. The trade union challenge is, as one aide put it, viewed with trepidation by the Blair team, "Because to be honest, these guys (the Fire Brigades Union) have been at their game a lot longer than we've been at ours." It is possible - even probable - that the hardline leadership will err where they always do and overestimate the militancy of their members. But a strike would inflict damage on Mr Blair's reputation for keeping the peace at home that would not be easily repaired. His sofar unbreached authority would be shaken.

Operation Moderation has one obvious flaw when dealing with such sensitive industrial action - if the strike proceeds and escalates and lives are lost, no Government, however nifty in its positioning, will escape the blame. Chaos is corrosive to power.

That is why the Prime Minister is anxious to pull off a vital strategic coup: namely to get the fire union to delay their industrial action for a further month, which he can do, deploying some arcane bit of union legislation (for which Mr Blair has that Thatcher woman to thank). That would bring the date to the verge of the pay review - and tip the balance of discussion among the FBU's more moderate membership onto the basis of a deal, rather than the basis for a strike.

All of this would look more promising if Downing Street's record on guessing which way unions would go were better. It is, alas, lamentable. Neither Mr Blair nor his advisers foresaw the of the moderate Ken Jackson at Amicus, nor the extremist takeover of the RMT. It is a frequently aired complaint on the Left of the party and among the trade union-sponsored Labour MPs that Number 10 has, in the words of one senior backbencher, "no idea what's going on in the unions and no interest in finding out".

Well, they have now. It may be that Mr Blair will, at the last minute, judge the exact mood of the firefighters, but one would not, on his previous form, put money on it.

On one point, however, Mr Blair should not profess surprise. The moment Gordon Brown loosened the corset on public spending was a starting gun for increased pay demands. For that reason, the Chancellor's statement yesterday that there be "no inflationary pay settlements" was an intervention which would try the composure of the Prime Minister at his most glacially polite.

It was, after all, Mr Brown who basked in the applause of his party having removed the spending constraints. The entire ministerial caste has been told to go forth and speak positively of the chance of a resolution to all this. "No reasonable government would treat this pay review anything but very sympathetically," were the honeyed words Downing Street poured in my ear yesterday.

Alistair Darling managed to emulate Mr Blair's good manners towards the "brave" firemen even as he was warning that a strike would cost lives on the road.

Only Mr Brown, it appears, is not feeling quite so polite. His insistence on productivity rises and robustly thrifty tone in an interview yesterday sit oddly with Number 10's attempt to diffuse the strike - and occasioned some backpedalling later on how a settlement could come from that dubious cornucopia, "local authority budgets".

Courtesy is not Gordon Brown's outstanding feature. But it's Mr Blair, the man who finally separated the Labour Party from automatic allegiance to the trade unions, who will bear the brunt of this test. He knows that he cannot afford a defeat, but neither can a leader who promises to unite the country afford a prolonged strike with inevitable fatalities. The high odds and sudden risks which he has faced in his foreign adventures now confront him - in full view of all of us - on the home front.

 

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