Blair - A failure of political judgment
What is the major political conclusion to be drawn from Wednesday's stunning 322-291 government defeat on the anti-terrorism bill? One obvious answer, widely raked over yesterday, is to stress Tony Blair's loss of authority, by pointing to his inability to drive his 90-day detention plans through a parliament in which Labour has a 66-vote majority. But, as Mr Blair's biographer John Rentoul observed yesterday, this argument could imply that rebel MPs would not do the same thing to a different leader whose authority was greater than Mr Blair's. Yet would any other Labour leader really have been more successful in promoting 90-day detention this week? It is not obvious. Maybe in the afterglow of an electoral honeymoon a new leader might get away with making such a draconian power into a loyalty test. But the reality is that not even Gordon Brown at his most commanding could now count on persuading many of Wednesday's 60 Labour civil liberty rebels back into the government lobbies on this same issue.
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