Tony Blair's Perfect Storm

Before the week is out, Tony Blair will discover whether he can remain Prime Minister, and if he can, whether the office is still worth holding. First there's the culmination of weeks of feverish campaigning, arm twisting and strategic concessions by Blair's Education Minister to contain a massive Labour rebellion over plans to increase university budgets by making students pay more. A loss on this bill would mean a central plank of Blair's push to rejuvenate British education — and his broader drive to find ways of modernizing public services without raising taxes — would stand rejected by his own M.P.s. "Disastrous" is how a senior aide envisioned that scenario last week.

Then there's Lord Hutton, who releases his exhaustive report into the suicide of David Kelly, the government weapons scientist who found himself caught in a furious row between Downing Street and the BBC over whether Blair oversold the case for war in Iraq. A direct finding that Blair lied when he denied any role in "outing" Kelly's name to reporters — a conceivable outcome, based on the public evidence put before Hutton — would make his job untenable. Two-thirds of the public thinks Blair should resign if Hutton declares him a liar, according to an ICM poll.

It's Blair's perfect storm. Frustrations with his leadership — his determination to introduce more private contractors into the public sector, his presidential style, his assumption that Labour M.P.s should repay his electoral success by toeing the line, his defiant Iraq policy — have been swirling around him for months. Now, the whirlwind could prove too strong even for Blair's legendary survival skills.

How could it have come to this? After all, Blair's Labour Party has been consistently ahead of the Tories for the last six years, which confounds the pattern of every British government since World War II and ordinarily would guarantee loyalty from his allies. The economy is outperforming the euro zone, and Blair can — and often does — boast of historically low unemployment. Even his tuition-fee bill is more generous to students from poorer backgrounds than the current system. And while Kelly's death was tragic, the evidence given to Hutton also shows he was no paragon: he did not tell the whole truth to his bosses or Parliament's Foreign Affairs Committee about his contacts with reporters, and gave conflicting views about the integrity of the government's dossier on Iraqi WMD.

But Blair has two vulnerabilities he cannot shake off. One is Iraq. He demanded his party back him in a war that many of his M.P.s thought premature at best and illegal at worst. It hasn't helped that the chief U.S. weapons hunter quit last week, saying he didn't think there were any WMD stockpiles to find. The ICM poll shows that 53% of Britons think the war was justified anyway (against 41% who don't), but a MORI poll released last week found 59% are still dissatisfied with Blair's job performance. "His aura of invincibility has worn off," says one Labour M.P.

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