So as I was listening last week to a BBC podcast about Gordon Brown’s latest PR nightmare – spelling the name of a fallen soldier incorrectly when writing a condolence letter to the “soldier’s mother”:http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article6911801.ece, I had a thought. What if Brown stepped down, and Tony Blair came back as Prime Minister in a kind of caretaker role? Could this actually happen? That got me thinking about the players involved: Labour rank and file; Labour elites; and Blair himself.
This move would certainly help Labour writ large, swapping out their massively unpopular leader for their former rock star leader. So for anyone in the rank and file of labor – especially MPs fearful of losing their seats in the next election – this option should at least weakly dominate keeping Brown around.
For the Labour elites – whom we can think of here as potential future leaders of Labour following a defeat in the next election – the risk of removing Brown now is that one of them gets a leg up on a future leadership scramble by getting to be PM now for a number of months. Having Blair replace Brown, however, would keep the playing field even.
So what about Blair? On one hand, he would seem to be the biggest stumbling block. Why should he give up his good life to go back and lead a party into electoral suicide, especially the party he rescued in the first place? Wouldn’t it just tarnish his legacy? On the other hand, the bar is so low now that Blair probably would have no place to go but up. And if he did somehow – against all odds – manage to lead Labour to another victory, he returns in a position probably unlike any other British PM, with such unbelievably elevated status. Even if he brings Labour home to a smaller than expected defeated, he gains props as the party elder who helped out in the hour of despair, and gets back in the spotlight for a little while longer.
Probably will never happen, but I thought I’d ask the readers of the Monkey Cage if you know of any analogous returns to glory in other countries? Jerry Brown, anyone?