LONDON, July 16: British Prime Minister Tony Blair on Sunday scotched notions that he might quit office in the coming months as bad news piles up for his governing Labour Party.
He has seen his popularity dip and has been politically weakened by a series of scandals in his party over recent months — the latest blow being the arrest of Lord Michael Levy, Labour’s chief fundraiser, by police investigating alleged corruption in the way Britain’s main political parties raise money.
And Lord Roy Hattersley, a former Labour deputy leader, weighed in Sunday, urging the prime minister to step down at the centre-left party’s conference in September.
But Blair, at the annual summit of the Group of Eight industrialised democracies in Saint Petersburg, gave his strongest indication yet that he intends to stay in office for at least another year.
He said he did not want a ‘great bout of speculation’ about his departure timetable.
“I’m not sitting there, you know, obsessing the entire time about when the precise date is and all the rest of it,” he told BBC television on Sunday.
“I’ve made it clear all the way through, I’ll carry on doing the job.
“And so I look forward to next year’s G8 of course, but in the end the most important thing is to do the job,” he added.
Blair, prime minister for nine years, has vowed to step down before the next general election — due in May 2010 at the latest — but has not set a specific date.
However, recent scandals, involving party fundraising, the extra-marital love life of Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott, and the latter’s links to a billionaire US businessman, have fuelled speculation as to how much longer 53-year-old Blair intends to carry on in office.
Police are delving into the furore over whether Labour offered places in parliament’s unelected upper House of Lords — and the prestige that goes with a lordship — to wealthy supporters who lent it money for its re-election campaign last year.
No one has been charged in the ongoing probe, but the fact that Levy and others, including junior cabinet ministers, have been questioned raises the prospect that Blair himself will face a grilling from investigators.
As an opposition leader, Blair had pledged that his party would be ‘whiter than white’ in government.
But he admitted on Sunday: “We’ve had huge problems obviously on this front,” saying “we have had people who’ve got themselves into difficulty”.
He refused to discuss the so-called ‘cash-for-honours’ furore and whether he as the Labour leader might find himself having to talk to the police.—AFP
