Blair fights another election

Simple enough proposal, complex execution. My preferred PoD on this is that Blair makes no deal with Brown and (as expected) beats him in the 1994 leadership election. Beholden to no-one, he faces no pressure to stand down before 2005 (this was the original deal, as we now know) and doesn't have the Brownite faction of the party trying to edge him out throughout the 2005-2010 years.

Now, there's probably still going to be internal problems for Blair within the party, but not on the scale of the Blair/Brown factionalism. Let's say he stays in the post and calls a General Election in either 2009 (more his style) or 2010. World events happen otherwise the same, Iraq, Recession etc. By 2009 he will have outlasted Margaret Thatcher as the longest serving post-1945 PM.

The real questions here: do Labour win the election? Cameron believed Blair to be 'unbeatable', and Clegg (if elected in this TL) would probably be seen as even more of an irrelevant lightweight by the electorate as in OTL. The TV debates, if Blair agrees to them (no sure thing) would surely be dominated by Blair, so it's debatable (pun intended) as to whether Cameron would ask for them in the first place. The other question is when it would have been - mid 2009, as was Blair's style, or May 2010 to go as long as possible to help the economy?

My gut says Labour would have hung on, depending on how Blair runs the financial crisis and who his Chancellor is - does Brown stay on? Perhaps having been fairly beaten in 1994 means he's had 16 years to get over it and pledges to serve the economy as best he can. If not, who is Blair's chancellor? Like the OTL last election, Iraq is unlikely to be a big issue (though with Blair still in the job it might come up more often). My gut also tells me that Blair would lead a Labour government pushing for a middle ground between the Brown and Clameron stances on the deficit - public investment in vulnerable places (see the Regeneration programme for Blair-era examples of that) but serious cuts, too.

The final question is, of course - when does he bloody well go? Does he stagger on til 2015 and surely lose the election? I would think he would rather stay in for a year or two, see that 'his' cuts are working and the economy is perhaps superficially working, then stand aside for David Miliband.
 
Its ASB for me to have run again, I had already accomplished everything I wanted to during my tenure in office. Plus it was only a matter of time before everyone got wind of my closet toryism
 
I can see something similar to Thatchers downfall. A challenger emerges from the left wing of the Labour party after Blair's policies become more right wing (he says that he agrees with the Tories deficit reduction plan for instance) and he's forced to withdraw before 2015 an election which Labour lose, regardless of candidate or campaign.
 
I think a lot would depend on what happens to Brown. Does he still get the number two position? If so, does Labour still run with the PFI policy/golden rule etc? I would suspect that even minor changes regarding financial management early in the term could signficantly alter how Britain fares at the start of the recession and at the 2010 election.
 
I don't know. Brown is unstable enough that even without the deal making him feel as though he had been cheated after a while when Blair starts becoming much less popular post-Iraq invasion I could see him attaempting a Thatcher or a version of the insurgency he and his supporters ran in our timeline.
 
I suspect that without Brown, Blair would go about the same time as per OTL or even earlier. A lot of the pressure against Blair within the party and the media was held back by the understanding that the Brown succession was inevitable and that natural wastage would despatch Blair sooner or later. Without Brown as Chancellor the left is going to be a lot more animated against this government than OTL. They will have no likely future saviour and will start to ask more probing questions earlier.

I am not sure what Blair's reaction to the recession would be as it would depend on who was his Chancellor - Blair knew essentially nothing about economics and was content to remain ignorant. I'm sure Blair's instinct would be to out Tory the Tories on cuts but that would surely be more than the party would stand for.

The 1994 thing was more mutual really though. It wasn't really in anyone's interest for there to be a contest then.
 
It all depends on who Blair appoints as Chancellor. Maybe Brown at first but then - perhaps Milburn? I think that even Blair admitted that his first term in office (1997-2001) had been a largely wasted one.
It also depends on what happens regarding Iraq. If Blair had been in charge in this year's election I think that it would have been another referendum on Iraq. :rolleyes:
 

Thande

Donor
I suspect that without Brown, Blair would go about the same time as per OTL or even earlier. A lot of the pressure against Blair within the party and the media was held back by the understanding that the Brown succession was inevitable and that natural wastage would despatch Blair sooner or later.
I agree.

I always had this conspiracy theory that there was actually no resentment between Brown and Blair and it had been engineered by Blair - media-savvy Magnificent Bastard that he was - to make the media focus solely on court-intrigue succession and make them ignore the Tories, as though we were a one-party state seeing who Deng Xiaopeng was going to appoint. Since Blair went we've seen that the Brown-Blair bitterness was indeed real, so I was wrong on that score, but I still think Blair deliberately played it up for the reasons I mention.
 
I think that's a good point, but you've got it the wrong way round - the fact that media did become so obsessed with Blair-Brown was a function of the fact that the Tories were an irrelevance, (why bother covering personalities who are a billion miles from power when you can cover Blair and Brown) not because anyone had contrived that.

I can't remember the exact Rawnsley quote here but it goes something along the lines of 'The Leader of the Opposition was already in Downing Street. He was called Gordon Brown'.
 
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