It looks like we are in the last days of Tony Blair, a man who has been prime minister of Britain for as long as I have been voting. The PM has told members of his party that he intends to step down in the middle of next year, giving his successor, who we assume will be Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown, time to prepare for the general election in 2009.

The question is, will Blair get that far? He looks increasingly like a lame duck. His government is caught up in serious problems over immigration. Former home office minister Charles Clarke admitted at the end of last month that 1,023 immigrant prisoners had been released when they should have been deported, despite the list including several murderers, rapists and child molesters. Clarke was later fired in a huge cabinet reshuffle two weeks ago, but Blair remains ‘rattled’, in the words of Conservative rival David Cameron, on issues of law and order.

He may also soon be facing his own problems with the police. It emerged a month ago that Blair had personally solicited loans for the Labour Party from several British businessmen. The question is whether these businessmen were promised seats in the House of Lords in return for the cash. It’s illegal for governments to sell peerages, even though every government does. But they usually do so in a subtle way, without ever going as far as to assure businessmen they would definitely get a peerage. The police are now investigating whether that happened in this case. If so, advisors close to Blair could go to prison. The reputation of Blair himself, who came to power in 1997 on a campaign to clean up politics, would also be severely damaged.

And each month, more British servicemen die in Iraq. This is really the British public’s most serious issue with Blair - that he took us into an unnecessary war that has made the UK extremely unpopular among Muslims, and inflamed politics in the Middle East. Most British people agree with the rest of the world that George Bush Jr and the Neo-Conservatives are slightly unhinged. So why are we supporting them?

This is a particularly burning issue for the Labour Party, elements of which have never really liked Blair anyway, and seen him merely as a means to power. After all, he has pursued Thatcherite policies throughout the economy, opening up sectors from hospitals to railways to private capital. And he has involved Britain in three major wars (Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq), no small feat for one prime minister.

If anything, Blair is more unpopular with the Labour Party than with the British public, and the Labour Party is much more of a threat to him. It could conspire to force him out of power against his will, and bring in Gordon Brown instead. Brown is very popular with the Labour Party because he is seen as more of a traditional Labourite.

But I wouldn’t bet on Blair being forced out early. He is certainly embattled, but if there’s one thing he’s proved over the last nine years, it’s his amazing ability to get out of scrapes. Several times over the last few years, he’s faced major crises, major rebellions within his party, and each time he’s somehow managed to convince the sceptics.

His great skill is his masterful power of persuasion. I remember watching his speech at the Labour Party conference in 2003, the year of the Iraq War, after he had tried and failed to get a UN mandate to support the attack on Saddam Hussein. He had taken a gamble – that supporting the US would keep it within the international legal system and protect the post-war global order – and he had failed. His own party hated him.

And yet somehow, during that speech, he won people round, so that if they didn’t love him, they at least were prepared to tolerate him. And the key to his rhetoric, something Russian politicians could learn in their dealing with the West, is he admits his faults. He acknowledges the gripes people have in their minds against him, but then moves on to explain why he did the things he did. If Russian politicians had done that just once during the Yukos affair, it would have mitigated a lot of the damage that affair did to relations with the West.

I wonder if Gordon Brown will have the same electoral success, because he seems to lack that singular quality of Blair’s to be able to read people’s emotions and acknowledge what they hold against him. Brown is a different type of personality. When he’s under attack, he tends to get extremely defensive, moody and withdrawn. I suspect that will prove to have fewer political lives than Blair.

Julian Evans, a British freelance journalist based in Moscow.

May 19, 2006