British prime minister Tony Blair tried to buy more political breathing space yesterday with a public guarantee that he would quit Downing Street within a year.
However, despite the clear desire of the majority of Labour MPs for an end to the damaging splits in the party over the leadership issue, some supporters of chancellor Gordon Brown insisted that Mr Blair had not gone far enough.
Evidently co-operating to some degree, Mr Blair delivered his carefully-controlled statement at 3pm, just hours after Mr Brown had said he would support the prime minister's decisions on his future.
Saying he would be gone within a year, Mr Blair refused to go further and set a date, as demanded by opponents. "I am not going to set a precise date now. I don't think that's right," he said. But he did promise to outline one later, rather than spring a surprise. "I will do that at a future date and I'll do it in the interests of the country and, depending on the circumstances, of the time," he said.
Mr Brown's barb that he too still "had questions" about Mr Blair's leadership intentions revealed some evidence of the tensions between the two in recent days.
Last night, one close Brown ally, MP Doug Henderson, who was sacked by Mr Blair in 1999, said the electorate did not know any more about the prime minister's intentions now than before his statement.
Leading moderate MP Tony Wright, however, spoke for more when he told The Irish Times: "We are looking less like a party of government when we look like a squabbling pack."
Welcoming the declarations by both Mr Blair and Mr Brown, MP Glenda Jackson agreed. "We must reassure the country that we are not a left-wing party engaging in civil war," she said.
Mr Blair's leadership did not suffer any further departures on foot of the resignations on Wednesday of a junior minister and six other MPs who had been promoted by him to the first rung of the ministerial ladder.
Last night, Rotherham MP Denis MacShane scathingly described the MPs as "the glorious seven". "You don't need a PhD in political science to realise it is in nobody's interests for this madness to continue."
Urging Labour to let Mr Blair go in his own time, former cabinet minister and European commissioner Peter Mandelson said Labour had suffered "a week of madness".
