All by his-self.......

Former Member

With the fall of Alastair Campbell, Tony Blair has never looked more alone at the top of Downing Street. With no solid Blairites in the cabinet as well as a new lack of faithful and trusted advisors in Downing Street, as well as 43% of the voters saying he is unfit to be Prime Minister - Blair is certainly more alone than Mrs Thatcher was in 1990.

We can see how desperate he's become with the fact that he has had to have union leaders round to Downing Street for - shock horror! - a constructive meeting as opposed to lecturing them not be nasty to the big bosses who give him lots and lots of money.

We have a potentially tricky few months for him - the TUC and Labour Party conferences, the Hutton Inquiry report and the votes in Parliament on university top-up fees and foundation hospitals (surely even New Labour MPs are not stupid enough to believe anything Blair says to convince them now after he lied to them over Iraq?).

I think the constructive talks for me illustrates how seriously Blair takes this threat. He wouldn't urinate on the unions if they were on fire ordinarily which makes me think he believes this to be a much more serious crisis than it appears to us the public. I hope there will be defeats for Blair on his favoured policies at conference and I hope the Labour MPs will find their consciences and vote against foundation hospitals and top-up fees, however I'm not sure whether this will happen, they've always backed down before. The Hutton Inquiry will I believe be more critical of the government than we first thought and as Blair himself said - the buck stops with me.

So I just wondered what the rest of you make of the current situation for Blair? Is he close to losing power? Will be gone by 2004?