Fight Club

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Tony Blair has faced down mutinies before, most recently when Britain — and his own Labour Party — was up in arms about his pro-war stance on Iraq. Yet even in the midst of that bitter, noisy battle, the British Prime Minister's smooth talk and skillful party management brought most of his rebellious backbenchers into line. But last Monday, at a meeting with around 200 angry Labour M.P.s and peers, Blair's magnetism finally proved unequal to the task. This time, the rebellion wasn't triggered by war and geopolitics. It was about a personal feud — but one that could do more to hurt the Labour Party than even Iraq did. The assembly upbraided Blair and his longtime No. 2, Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown, for once again allowing their protracted argument over who should have the top job to explode into public view. Instead of party leaders enforcing discipline in the ranks, the ranks were trying to discipline the leaders.

Someone had to. The conflagration was set off by a new biography of Brown that depicts a relationship so tortured and fractious that the two most powerful men in the country are barely on speaking terms. The book's most incendiary charge: that last summer Blair reneged on a promise to step down as Prime Minister and clear the way for Brown. "There is nothing that you could ever say to me now that I could ever believe," Brown allegedly told Blair. When excerpts from the book — Brown's Britain by Robert Peston, a journalist with close ties to the Chancellor's camp — appeared on Jan. 9, the media erupted. The conflict was undermining party unity, it was said, and endangering the government's support in the run-up to the general election expected in the spring. So last Monday's routine meeting became an emergency damage-control session.

M.P.s and peers delivered a "hallelujah chorus of rebukes" to both men, according to Paul Flynn, a veteran M.P. for Newport West, who was there. "Blair has lectured us again and again that what brought down all previous Labour governments was disunity," he says. "Now the preacher has been caught sinning." Brown sat silent throughout the meeting, his massive head embedded in his meaty shoulders. Blair only glancingly addressed accusations of a rift with Brown; instead, he delivered a eulogy on Labour's achievements in office. He finished to a hostile silence. Blair loyalist Clive Soley got the biggest cheer when he counseled the occupants of numbers 10 and 11 Downing Street to love thy neighbor. But brotherly love is in short supply at the top of the Labour Party, and it now seems clear that there are three men vying to lead Britain: Blair, opposition Conservative Party leader Michael Howard and Gordon Brown.

Labour M.P.s worry that whether or not Brown actually said he couldn't trust Blair — Blair has denied it; Brown hasn't; the Tories are already building an ad campaign around it — the episode will reinforce the public's view of the Prime Minister as too slippery for his own (or anyone else's) good. And Labour backbench M.P.s fear that public support will hemorrhage if voters feel the government is more concerned with personal rivalries than with improving the health care and education systems and consolidating its economic achievements. For the moment, though, the principals have carried on with business as usual: Blair giving a speech promising prosperity for all; Brown heading off for a seven-day tour of Africa to lobby for measures to tackle poverty and aids. "This hasn't been a good few months for us, what with this stuff about Gordon and Tony and the residue of Iraq," says Fraser Kemp, a Labour whip and deputy chairman of election planning. "But none of that comes through to the electorate." At least so far. A poll taken over the second weekend in January by research organization Populus put Labour at 38% and the Tories at 33%; Labour's private polling shows the party's lead growing. The Tories hope to reverse that trend with new billboards showing Blair and Brown scowling at one another under the headline: how can they fight crime when they're fighting each other?