So, now we know. Tony Blair isn’t going, according to The Times on Friday. Oh yes he is, according to The Guardian on the same day. The PM has decided it would be destabilising to give a timetable for his departure, says one news outlet. But he has agreed to go next summer, say the others – he just doesn’t want to make a fuss about it.  

Tony Blair’s long goodbye is turning into a thundering bore. It is the most tedious story in British politics, yet it remains the only story in British politics. It drives the public mad hearing about his latest prevarications; it drives hacks bonkers having to write about it.  

I mean, how long can we go on alternating headlines about Tony going with headlines about Tony staying? We’re caught in a loop, but the entire political system is caught in this loop, paralysed by the Prime Minister’s indecision. Nothing can get moving again until he goes.

In his pre-conference interviews Blair was playing the old tune about there being much still to do. “Revolutionary” health service reforms, the war on terror, antisocial behaviour. But in the clearest sign yet that Blair has been afflicted by mad-Prime Minister disease, he said he is going to tackle antisocial behaviour where it starts: in the womb.

Teenage mothers could be forced to accept state help before their children are born in order to to prevent their progeny becoming a “menace to society a few years down the line” as the PM put it. If they don’t, they could lose benefits or have their children taken into care. 

It isn’t clear exactly what antenatal intervention he has in mind. Perhaps they could be obliged to listen to recordings of the PM’s speeches on respect and community, much as middle-class mothers used to play Beethoven to their unborn. Perhaps the intervention could be sterner still. After all, if we know these children are going to be a threat to society and themselves, as the Prime Minister insists, why let them be born at all?

Of course, Tony Blair isn’t going to turn to eugenics – at least we hope not. But the idea of foetal interventionism is so Orwellian it seems astonishing that he or his advisers could have thought it was a sensible initiative to highlight at the start of a crucial parliamentary session. The ideas were immediately dubbed Fasbos – Foetal Antisocial Behaviour Orders. 

Do Labour seriously believe this rubbish is going to do them any good? The focus on crime may chime with public concern, but it also reminds people that crime is still a serious problem after nine years of Labour. Law and order initiatives represent a kind of anti-spin – they divert attention from the fact that, overall, crime is actually down in Britain.

As for the “revolutions” in public provision, I don’t know if the PM has looked recently, but things aren’t going well south of the Border. PFI is becoming a national scandal as further evidence emerges – as in the recent Channel 4 Dispatches programme, titled Public Service, Private Profit – of the way PFI projects have been hijacked by sharp-witted financiers. Wards are being closed and operations cancelled as hospitals come to terms with their billion-pound deficits. The £6bn national computer system, which was supposed to make patient choice a reality, is a disaster area with suggestions that it may end up costing over £20bn. Many doctors still believe the new system will not work.

The near-impossibility of selling the PM’s modernising reforms suggests he will fall back on the war on terror to rekindle public passion for his leadership. We are promised a raft of new measures to make us safer and deal with the greatest threat “since the second world war” as Home Secretary John Reid put it. Expect 90-day detention to figure prominently in the forthcoming Westminster agenda.

But I think we’ve been here once too often. It isn’t so easy to scare people with the power of nightmares now they’ve been living with them for five years. People have had time to consider the nature of the terrorist threat, and the likely impact on their lives. There is clearly a threat from Islamist extremism in Britain, but it is thankfully a limited one.  

We know what terrorists can do – we saw it in London a year ago. But the British people brushed it off – as well they might, since more people were killed on British roads that day than by the bombers. The devastation caused by al-Qaeda is very much less extensive than that caused by the IRA in the 1970s. 

We are manifestly not facing a world war. There is no Muslim invasion force preparing to cross the English Channel. Moreover, people are increasingly coming to recognise, as opinion polls have demonstrated over the summer, that the government’s own policies in the Middle East have fuelled the threat.

Whenever the PM opens his mouth, he reminds the British voters of the reasons they don’t want him around any more. Or his 3200 spin doctors and consultants. There is another agenda for Labour but it lies, for the time being, in the Chancellor’s head. Brownites hope he has great things up his sleeve, comparable with Bank of England independence, to jump-start his administration. Perhaps a reform of the Lords, a mass house-building programme, rebuilding the railways. But the truth is that nobody really knows what is going on in Gordon’s skull. His silence is as conspicuous as ever.

The Chancellor is avoiding any public endorsement of Blair’s latest “comeback” programme, presumably as a mute commentary on what he thinks of it. Some believe he is keeping quiet about his own plans in case Tony Blair steals them, as he did the pension reforms. But Brown will have to break his silence at the party conference this month. He will have to give an idea of what the country, and the party, can expect under his leadership. At the very least he has to give some hope that there IS an alternative to Blair, and that Trident replacement and nuclear power isn’t the sum total of his vision. The real nightmare in Downing Street is the possibility that the Chancellor doesn’t have any real alternatives: that he will continue with the same old neoliberal economic policies, the flexible labour market, PFI (which he strongly supports), and ever more complex schemes of personal taxation.
 
The speculation has been going on so long it will almost certainly be an anticlimax when Brown finally gets the keys to Number 10. Perhaps this is what Tony Blair intended. It’s only human to hope your successor doesn’t outshine you. Has all the delay been designed to create a climate of uncertainty and speculation which will diminish Gordon Brown? 

We know Blairites want to lock him into “modernising” policies which will allow Blair to continue his rule after he’s gone. Do they also want us to get bored by Brown before he’s even in the door? Either way, Labour are now staring at electoral defeat as a result of this interminable succession crisis. And the rest of us are being driven quietly mad.