...was not to sack Gordon Brown, early on. He would have made him look stupid. Unlike say, Michael Heseltine, Brown just did not have - and still doesn't - any of the requisite people skills to cause a lot of trouble on the backbenches and mount an eventual leadership challenge. Pushed out of the Cabinet, Brown just would have become even more dour, grumpy and isolated.
Some people I've been speaking to recently seem to think that Tony Blair today must be loving it, watching the spectacle of Labour's collapse in an aprés moi, le déluge kind of way. I would suggest the opposite. He must be thinking that Brown was actually a paper tiger, who traded off the Golden Economic Legacy bequeathed to him by John Major whose only real success was to obstruct Blair's relatively timid reform agenda.
It's also risible that, allegedly, Brown thinks an economic recovery over the next two years will now save him. The "fantastically good figures" (see Ruth Lea's excellent 2005 paper for the CPS "Whatever happened to the Golden Legacy?") as described by The Treasury to an incoming Gordon Brown in 1997 couldn't stop Tory meltdown in 1997. There's next to no chance of the economy's metrics looking that good again by 2010.
That's why not sacking Gordon Brown shows Blair was not the admirable leader some misguided Americans and worse, a few Tories, think he was.
