Calls for PM to set accession date
Saturday, 06 May 2006 01:16
Calls for PM to set accession date
Tony Blair is facing calls to set a public timetable for a leadership accession after Labour's worst electoral performance since 1997.
After the party lost more than 300 councillors across England and control of 18 town halls, some backbenchers have urged the prime minister to step down.
One of them is former health secretary Frank Dobson who described yesterday's cabinet reshuffle as little more than "re-arranging the deckchairs on the Titanic".
He said the party needed "new management".
The Labour Representation Committee, a grassroots body of more than 700 Labour party members, also urged Mr Blair to rethink his position.
John McDonnell MP, chair of the committee, said the results delivered a clear message to the party.
"It's time for change. Real change. Not a 'managed transition' from Blair to Brown or an irrelevant cabinet reshuffle. That is no change at all," he said.
"New Labour's time is past. Now is the time for us to move on."
Meanwhile, the Socialist Campaign Group, which represents 25 Labour MPs, said the reshuffles failed to address "the crisis of confidence" among its membership.
"People who marched out to vote for us nearly a decade ago to get rid of the Tories have been turned into a bitter, disillusioned, stay-at-home vote."
Former local government minister Nick Raynsford last night told Channel 4: "There is a very clear feeling growing in the party that we would like clarity.
"I think it is in the interests of the party that a timetable is set which allows the successor to have a good period of time to get the right team in place.
"If the greatest priority is to ensure the government focuses on delivering on its key priorities, and I believe it is, then I am afraid to say it is simply shuffling around a large number of ministers at an unprecedented number - particularly with John Reid moving I think into his eighth different ministerial appointment - it is not exactly the right way to get the result," he observed.
Speaking earlier to the BBC, former minister Andrew Smith said: "I think the sooner we see a timetable for the orderly transition which the prime minister has promised the better.
"I am voicing the concerns which very many previously Labour supporters said to me on the doorstep. They said this has to be sorted out, things cannot go on like this."
But local government Minister, Phil Woolas, challenged the demands saying the election results should be put into "proper context".
Tory leader David Cameron described the reshuffle as "pretty desperate stuff".
"I was pressing the prime minister more than a week ago to remove Charles Clarke and he said, ‘no, never’, and now he’s made to do it."
The climb down, he said, would have been "humiliating" for Mr Blair.
"What the country needs is not a reshuffle, but a replacement to the government," he added.
Liberal Democrat leader Sir Menzies Campbell said it was time Mr Blair to name a date to step down.
"The prime minister is having to shuffle with an increasingly battered pack. No amount of cosmetic surgery can disguise the fact that this government has suffered a permanent loss of credibility."
It has also emerged that a draft letter calling on the premier to set a departure timetable is circulating among MPs and it has been signed by about 50.
