What worries Blair insiders, who fear that the leaker has more documents to pass around, is that the memos fit a disconcerting pattern. They point to Blair’s political vulnerabilities and expose a ruling clique seemingly obsessed with presentation over substance. (It didn’t help that in Parliament recently Blair tripped over his tongue and declared that his government’s watchword was “spin, not substance.”) In an April memo, Blair urges his advisers to come up with “eye-catching initiatives” and ended on an unstatesmanlike note: “I should be personally associated with as much of this as possible.” In another, Philip Gould, a former adman and political consultant who is close to Blair, warns: “The New Labour brand has been badly contaminated.” In fact, though Blair’s popularity has dipped this year, the government is still 10 percentage points ahead of the Conservatives in the polls–enough to give Labour a very comfortable majority in a new Parliament.
That hasn’t stopped critics from calling for Gould’s resignation. Blair was standing by his man, but the deputy prime minister, John Prescott, had some fun at Gould’s expense. With barely concealed disdain, he told an interviewer, “All that glitters isn’t Gould.” Or as Gould himself put it with unwitting accuracy in one of his memos, “Our current situation is serious.”
