RT Monitoring Desk
EDINBURGH: Tony Blair endorsed long-standing finance minister Gordon Brown as Britain’s next leader on Tuesday and said he would announce next week when he was stepping aside as prime minister. Ten years after the landslide election win that swept Labour to power, Blair said now was the time for a new team to run Britain and Brown would make a “great prime minister”.
“Within the next few weeks I won’t be the prime minister of this country,” Blair told a Labour Party rally in Scotland, where his party is set for a drubbing in elections on Thursday. “In all probability a Scot will become prime minister of this country and that’s someone who built one of the strongest economies in the world and who I’ve always said would make a great prime minister.” Blair, Britain’s second-longest serving leader in a century, was forced to say last year he would quit after bitter in-fighting between his backers and a Brown camp impatient for power after a decade in the prime minister’s shadow. Many in Blair’s party never forgave him for sending British troops to Iraq in 2003 despite public opposition, and his refusal to call for a ceasefire in the Lebanon war last year was regarded as a catalyst for the revolt.
Anger over Iraq and disillusionment with Labour whittled its huge 1997 majority of 179 down to 66 in 2005 and the opposition Conservatives lead comfortably in opinion polls. Blair is expected to announce his resignation within days of elections to Scottish and Welsh parliaments and English councils on Thursday, in which Labour is predicted to get a drubbing. The latest speculation is that Blair will throw in the towel soon after Northern Ireland’s assembly meets next Tuesday, drawing a line under three decades of violence in the province. Despite securing peace in Northern Ireland, polls show Britons rank Iraq as Blair’s biggest mistake.