tony blair's leadership

Tony Blair's not on his way out, but it's not clear where he's going

THERE'S something rather thrilling about watching Tony Blair on form. There he is, facing his party's annual conference, bloodied by the failure to find any Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, the corrosive effect of the Hutton Inquiry and the war's messy aftermath; with Labour traditionalists who oppose his market-oriented policies out to pull his domestic agenda apart; with the press announcing his imminent replacement by his ambitious chancellor of the exchequer, Gordon Brown. And yet his brilliant showman's sense catches the audience's mood with a speech that is bruised, touched with humility, but above all defiant. He is unrepentant about Iraq and apparently determined not to give an inch of ground on his domestic agenda to his critics. "I have no reverse gear," he said. Most of the audience loved it, though the metaphor doesn't bear too much consideration: as a BBC commentator pointed out afterwards, if you ar...