Chancellor Gordon Brown yesterday refused to call for prime minister Blair to set a date for his departure.
Brown expressed his fears about the situation, telling the Sunday AM programme that ‘when the Labour Party divides and extremists take over, and the moderates lose control, that is a recipe for disaster’.
He was asked about the letter from over 50 Labour MPs that calls for the party’s ‘NEC in consultation with the Prime Minister, to lay out, no later than the end of the current Parliamentary session, a clear timetable and procedure for the election of a new Labour Party Leader’.
Brown claimed: ‘Well the vast majority of people want what Tony Blair wants himself and has said that he wants to achieve and that is a stable and orderly transition.’
He warned that ‘we don’t need outriders dictating the agenda.’
Brown repeated his warning that the local elections has been ‘a wake-up’ call for Labour.
Asked ‘what does “renewal” mean’, Brown said: ‘It means we’ve got to recognise the world is changing.’
He added: ‘The world is changing as a result of globalisation, terrorism. Security is far more important to people.
‘The quality of life, the work/life balance, the environment, all these issues have got to be addressed and in the same way we proved ourselves relevant to the last ten years, we have got to renew to be relevant to the next ten years.’
He said that ‘we’ve got to win a new Labour coalition yet again’.
It was put to the chancellor that a lot of people believe the transition ‘requires at least you to know when the Prime Minister is going to stand down. Do you know?’
Brown replied: ‘No.’ He added that ‘it’s a matter for Tony’.
Pressed that ‘this is going to go on for the next three years’, Brown insisted: ‘No, it’s a matter for Tony and the Labour Party themselves’.
Interviewer Andrew Marr suggested: ‘It’s a power struggle going on, the Prime Minister has put in place core Blairite supporters around him to keep you and your people out and he’s going to carry on like that for the next few years and in the end he’s more aggressive and more ruthless than you are.’
Brown replied: ‘I don’t look at it this way. I look at it as all of us having to get together, Tony Blair, myself and others, and working at how we address these challenges.’
He was asked: ‘And you don’t see the last few days as a Blairite coup?’
Brown replied: ‘What I see in the last few days, actually, is the electorate telling us we’ve got to do better, and we are going to do better’.
Separately, arch-Blairite, former transport secretary Stephen Byers warned: ‘We cannot have the forced removal of Tony Blair as our leader.’
Meanwhile, it emerged yesterday that Blair loyalist Jane Kennedy had not been sacked in Thursday’s cabinet reshuffle.
She told the press yesterday that she had resigned as a health minister over her disquiet at the effect of NHS Payment by Results ‘reforms’ on her local Alder Hey children’s hospital.
Kennedy said she had ‘been asked to do a job and bring political judgement to the job.’
However, she added that when she did that and was ‘told you shouldn’t be expressing your opinions’ she realised it was time to resign.
Kennedy said that ‘for some time’ she had been in conflict with ministers and Downing Street over ‘the way certain aspects of NHS reforms were dealt with’.
