WITH the police closing in to interview him under caution about the cash for peerages scandal, and after his government has been stunned by the blow delivered to President Bush in the mid-term Congressional elections, Blair is now facing a disintegrating regime at home.
He has already lost key supporters Blunkett and Charles Clarke, who were forced to resign in rapid succession as Home Secretary, one as a result of a scandal, and the other as a result of alleged incompetence.
Yesterday he lost another, after Lord Sainsbury jumped ship.
He has quit as a Labour minister at a very critical moment for the party and the government citing personal reasons, saying that he wanted to return to business and charity work.
He was the perfect Blairite, with the perfect credentials. A right wing billionaire monopoly capitalist with the deepest pockets and some philanthropic tendencies.
In his political origins he was a supporter of the breakaway from the Labour Party, the Social Democratic Party, and was very politically close to its leader, one of the original Gang of Four who split from the Labour party in 1981, David Owen.
Owen, Rogers, Williams and Jenkins, broke from the Labour party with the object of making sure that there would never be another Labour government.
Sainsbury quit the Social Democratic party to join the Labour Party as soon it came under the leadership of the anti-socialist Blair, recognising that Blair and Owen and Jenkins were political soulmates, and that it was through attaching himself to Blair that he would achieve political office.
Sure enough, he was rewarded with a peerage in October 1997, just months after the election of the first Blair government in May 1997.
He was appointed Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State at the Department for Trade and Industry with responsibility for Science and Innovation in the House of Lords in 1998.
He is believed to have donated £6.5m to Labour since 2002. In July 2006 he was questioned by police as part of the cash for peerages inquiry over a £2m loan to the Labour Party. Lord Sainsbury apologised for the fact that the loan was undisclosed, saying he had confused it with a declared donation he had made.
The supermarket billionaire is one of 48 people questioned by police over the ‘cash-for-honours’ affair.
Yesterday Chancellor Brown denied Lord Sainsbury was ‘leaving a sinking ship’.
Lord Sainsbury earlier revealed he would be carrying out a review of government science policy for Brown over the next few months, making it clear that Brown was OK as far as he was concerned and that it was Blair that was the problem.
Evidently, the cash for peerages scandal with its alleged financial impropriety, and police interest, plus the odium of a government that lied its way to war with Iraq, and the hundreds of thousands of corpses involved, with more and more demands for a privy council inquiry is bad for business.
So the bourgeois billionaire has quit while he is still ahead, but at the same time is leaving his options with Brown open.
Sainsbury is not alone. Former Blair favourite Alan Johnson, the ex-CWU leader, has also stabbed Blair in the back with his open declaration of support for Gordon Brown, and his assurances that he would loyally serve Brown as deputy leader, and be his ‘Prescott’.
As well, the remaining Blair loyalists are keeping very quiet.
They know that the end of the road has been reached by their leader, and that much sooner rather than later he will be forced out of office by Labour MPs desperate to keep their jobs and their luxurious lifestyles at the next general election.
For the working class the issue is neither Blair nor Brown but one of bringing down the Blair-Brown government in order to go forward to a workers’ government and socialism as soon as possible.
