LONDON — The photographs of the two men from the old days look like weathered yearbook snapshots, two fresh-faced politicians elected together to Parliament in 1983, their hair a little too long. One of them, a young man named Tony Blair, is beaming broadly; the other, Gordon Brown, looks studious and serious.
They shared an office for a time, eventually collaborating in drafting a new vision of what Britain's Labor Party should be, marrying its old trade union, socialist traditions with market principles. When the party leadership came up for grabs in 1994, both men wanted the job. Brown, especially, thought he had earned it.
"Basically, Brown was the senior partner. Brown had been in the party longer, had more sort of intellectual roots," said Nick Kochan, coauthor of "Gordon Brown: The First Year in Power." "Blair was Johnny-come-lately, trained as a barrister, had lots of charm and appeal and savoir-faire. Brown was rather retiring and awkward -- brainy, but bad at people."
The two reportedly struck an agreement: Blair would take the party leadership -- and soon, the leadership of the country -- and Brown would inherit later, being granted responsibility for social and economic policymaking in the meantime.
More than a decade later, Brown tired of waiting. As chancellor of the exchequer -- Britain's treasury chief -- he has been one of Blair's most important allies and his most enduring rival during the prime minister's nine years in office. But he finally struck last week, forcing Blair to announce his departure within the year.
The move left the Labor Party in chaos and virtually guaranteed that Blair's final months in office would be marked by a bruising battle for leadership of the party both men helped to shape.
On Saturday, Blair appealed to the party to leave behind the vicious internal sniping of the last week and remake Labor's message to suit a changed Britain.
"There was something sort of irredeemably old-fashioned about it, I'm afraid: the attacks on the leader, the leader responds.... The only thing we didn't have was the smoke-filled room, and that's because we banned those," said Blair, whose entry into the room of party supporters was met with a standing ovation.
"We're three years away from an election, and we can remake ourselves," he said. "But we can only do it not by behaving like we did last week, but by behaving like we did when we were hungry for power, before 1997, when we understood that what mattered was the people and the country, not ourselves."
