Careful Blair, Blunkett is behind you!

By A.N. Wilson, Evening Standard Last updated at 00:00am on 10.03.03

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Clare Short will have earned the admiration of many for her criticism of the Prime Minister's "reckless" handling of the Iraq situation. Her promise to resign if he goes to war without the resolution is consistent with what she has been saying all along about the Iraqi crisis. Mr Blair must now be wondering how many more senior Cabinet colleagues might follow her example.

It now looks as if war is inevitable. The future biographers of Mr Blair will fascinate us by giving us insights into his state of mind during these weeks leading up to the conflict. Has he ceased to care what happens to his own party? It is possible that he positively thrives, psychologically, on the hatred of 200 or so of his own MPs. He would be damaged if a figure of Clare Short's magnitude resigned. But his stature might even be enhanced by the resignation of the pipsqueaks. Would we notice if nonentities such as ministerial aides Andrewy Reed and Anne Campbell disappeared from public life? No.

Clare Short would undoubtedly favour regime change in Downing Street, but how popular-is her candidate - Gordon Brown? The Labour MPs and, above all, the Cabinet colleagues whom Blair has to watch carefully are those who are not resigning.

Harold Macmillan, who lined himself up cleverly to succeed Anthony Eden after Suez, was one of the prime minister's most loyal supporters. In Cabinet, he egged Eden on to the catastrophic invasion, while quietly shaking his head about it in private. He even made surreptitious visits to the American Embassy to tell the ambassador that he, Supermac, would be the man to rely upon to sort out the mess after the PM's resignation.

One suspects that Gordon Brown is the Rab Butler of this Government - he has left it too late to succeed Tony Blair when the inevitable collapse comes. Won't they turn instead to David Blunkett? Either way, Blunkett has not blotted his copybook. He has so far had a very good war. By pushing Blair into a position that will antagonise the entire Labour Party, Blunkett is in a good position, when the debacle has happened, to be the unifying candidate, reminding the backbenchers of his solid years as a good old Lefty leader of Sheffield council.

Suited you, Adam

In the week that Country Life magazine decreed that Staffordshire was the "worst" county in England, Adam Faith has gone and died there. After appearing in a touring production of Love and Marriage in Stoke-on-Trent, the heart of the 62-year-old heart-throb at last gave out.

Those of us who were born in the 1950s will remember our mothers or elder sisters drooling over Adam Faith's chiselled good looks as they played What Do You Want If You Don't Want Money? on the gramophone. A very large part of his appeal in those early days was his London accent, and his clothes, both suggestive of the Teddy Boy. There was only a suggestion of the spiv about him, however.

In fact, he was always impeccably smart. He was the last star who wore ties, clean shirts and suits before the apparently unending era of the slob and the long-haired git began. To the end of his days he exuded sex appeal - and charm.

Maggie's extraordinary rise above snobbery

The ITV series, Maggie - the First Lady, produced by Jane Bonham Carter, is the best documentary of its kind I have seen. We see film footage of Margaret Roberts, aged nine, on a school outing, as well as Alderman Roberts of Grantham, walking in procession as mayor of the town. The researchers for the programme have found school and student contemporaries, nearly all of whom had something interesting to say about their remarkable classmate. One does not want to be too po-faced about these things, but if, as I have just done, you watch the whole series through in one shot, it makes you realise how powerfully snobbish and misogynous England still is. To step from the Grantham grocery to becoming an MP when still a young woman, and then the leader of the Conservatives, was an extraordinary achievement, whatever you might think of Margaret Thatcher's politics or her character.

In the later episodes, every single one of her former Cabinet colleagues who lines up to rubbish her already wrecked reputation does so from a blokeish, double-chinned, badbreathed, flatulent clubman's point of view. The sub-text of all they say is that this was what happened when a woman got out of control.

How utterly without talent or charm these fat old slobs all seem - especially, I thought, Chris Patten, whom the liberal-minded are now touting as Chancellor of Oxford University.

At last, a use for the Falkland Islands

In a new policy initiative, the Conservatives want to imitate the Australians and send 90,000 asylum seekers to an offshore location, pending the inquiry into each case. It is one of the most interesting proposals since Paul Johnson suggested sending the unemployed into outer space.

Where is the Tory's equivalent of Devil's Island going to be? The traditional "offshore" refuges for troublemakers, used by the British in the past, have included Ireland, Australia and America, but nowadays, the inhabitants would almost certainly object if their countries were once again used as dumps for those unwanted by the British. I can not come up with anywhere nearer than Port Stanley. Has Destiny at last found a use for the Falkland Islands.

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