Yesterday a junior defence minister and six parliamentary private secretaries resigned over Prime Minister Blair’s refusal to name a date for his departure.
Junior defence minister Tom Watson and the six parliamentary secretaries were among 17 normally loyal Labour MPs who signed a letter stating it is ‘no longer in the interest of the party or the country’ for Blair to remain in office.
Blair attacked Watson as being ‘disloyal, discourteous and wrong’, claiming he had been about to sack Watson over his signing of the round robin letter.
Watson was rapidly replaced by junior transport minister Derek Twigg.
But just an hour after Watson’s resignation, West Midlands MP Khaled Mahmoud announced he was leaving his job as parliamentary private secretary to home office minister Tony McNulty.
Shortly afterwards, five more parliamentary private secretaries – Wayne David, Ian Lucas, Mark Tami, Chris Mole and David Wright – resigned their posts.
In a joint statement, four of the group told Blair he had ‘not ended the uncertainty over when you intend to leave office, which is damaging the government and the party’.
Former transport minister, Labour MP Glenda Jackson said: ‘I believe Tony Blair should go now.’
Hayes and Harlington MP John McDonnell, chair of the Socialist Campaign Group of Labour MPs, announced he will be launching his leadership challenge today.
However, McDonnell attacked Blairite MPs campaigning for Blair to go.
He said: ‘I’m one of those people who have disagreed with New Labour’s policies for a long period of time and disagreed with Tony Blair’s style of government.’
He added: ‘But I’m not part of one of these cabals, part of this vicious in-fighting that’s going on.
‘We should allow the prime minister to leave with dignity, we should have a proper timetable for an election and have a democratic process.’
Transport and General Workers Union General Secretary Tony Woodley said: ‘If we’re not careful we’re going to be without a Labour government if we don’t clarify things.
‘It’s all very well having names in the frame but we need policies.
‘We need a new leader, we need a new agenda with issues and things that the British public are prepared to buy into and to vote for.
‘At the moment we have not seen any individual, and that includes Gordon Brown, who has come out and said “If I was the leader of our party here are the sort of policies that I would like to be involved with”.’
Woodley warned: ‘We can’t wait another ten months to know who the leader is’, adding that if Blair waits until after the Scottish Parliament and Welsh Assembly elections in May ‘we will have seen a bloodbath for our party.’
Yesterday’s resignations came in the wake of yesterday morning’s revelation that Blair planned to go on May 31 2007.
Downing Street insisted it did not leak the date.
But Chancellor Brown’s backers said yesterday that claims that Blair will go by May are ‘not good enough’.
Brown supporter, former minister Doug Henderson said: ‘There should be a new leader in place by the end of March.’
He said the timetable suggested by Blair’s allies, that he would go in about 12 months time, seemed ‘the worst time to appoint a new leader’.
‘People in the country want a change,’ Henderson stressed, adding that while Brown was ‘head and shoulders above any other candidate’, there should be a proper leadership contest.
Disgraced former home secretary David Blunkett said it was now ‘pretty clear that there is an understanding about a date next year, whether it’s 31 May when he announces it is open to speculation’.
