BRUSSELS, BELGUIM — If Oscar Wilde was right that to lose one parent was a misfortune, but to lose two smacked of carelessness, then Prime Minister Tony Blair has been careless indeed. With approval ratings consistently above 70%, he may be the most popular British prime minister since opinion polls began, but the holes in his Cabinet are gaping.
Late last year, he lost his secretary for Wales, after a still-mysterious encounter with a chap in a London park that left the minister short of his car, his wallet, his dignity and his political career. Just before Christmas, Blair's secretary for trade and industry, Peter Mandelson, and his paymaster general, Geoffrey Robinson, also resigned, a double disaster that is best explained by the resignation last week of a humble press secretary to the powerful chancellor of the Exchequer.
In American terms, this is like attributing the fall of the commerce secretary and a top White House aide to some dirty work inside the Treasury secretary's public-relations team. It would suggest something akin to civil war in the heart of the administration, and that is precisely what is happening in Britain.
There are some curious and fascinating characters involved in this tale of intrigue, starting with the former Communist, trade-union official and soccer fanatic Charles Whelan, probably the most foulmouthed press spokesman I have encountered in three decades in journalism. I have yet to hear him utter a sentence without the F-word liberally spattered throughout, as adjective, verb, noun and plain expletive.
Whelan was the press spokesman and close personal aide of Gordon Brown, who, as chancellor of the Exchequer, runs the British economy. Brown, son of a Scottish pastor, has always been closer to the old socialist traditions of the Labor Party of the working class and the trade unions than the more Clintonesque Blair. Blair, like Bill Clinton, is a post-ideological figure, who understands that the only way left-of-center parties can win modern elections is to appeal to the vast mass of middle-class voters.
So the political tensions between old Labor, the horny-handed sons of toil singing the "Red Flag" over their flat beer, and new Labor, where chaps in Armani suits call their brokers on cell phones while sipping chardonnay, lie at the heart of the British crisis. But personal rivalries add a dash of spice and malice to the mix.
