Blair faces calls to step down
Tony Blair and Gordon Brown
The Electoral Reform Society is a voluntary organisation that campaigns for a better democracy, particularly through changes to our electoral system.
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Home secretary Charles Clarke has today lost the fight to keep his job and been sacked by the prime minister.
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Saturday, 06, May 2006 12:00
Tony Blair is facing calls to set a public timetable for a leadership accession after Labour's worst electoral performance since 1997.
After the party lost more than 300 councillors across England and control of 18 town halls, some backbenchers have urged the prime minister to step down.
Former health secretary Frank Dobson described yesterday's cabinet reshuffle as little more than "re-arranging the deckchairs on the Titanic", and said the party needed "new management".
The Labour representation committee, a grassroots body of more than 700 Labour party members, also urged Mr Blair to rethink his position.
Chairman John McDonnell MP said the results delivered a clear message to the party: "It's time for change, real change. Not a 'managed transition' from Blair to Brown or an irrelevant cabinet reshuffle. That is no change at all.
"New Labour's time is past. Now is the time for us to move on."
Meanwhile, the Socialist Campaign Group, which represents 25 Labour MPs, said the reshuffles failed to address "the crisis of confidence" among the party's membership.
"People who marched out to vote for us nearly a decade ago to get rid of the Tories have been turned into a bitter, disillusioned, stay-at-home vote," a spokesman said.
Former local government minister Nick Raynsford last night told Channel 4 News: "There is a very clear feeling growing in the party that we would like clarity.
"I think it is in the interests of the party that a timetable is set which allows the successor to have a good period of time to get the right team in place.
"If the greatest priority is to ensure the government focuses on delivering on its key priorities, and I believe it is, then I am afraid to say simply shuffling around a large number of ministers at an unprecedented number…it is not exactly the right way to get the result," he observed.
Speaking earlier to the BBC, former minister Andrew Smith said: "I think the sooner we see a timetable for the orderly transition which the prime minister has promised the better.
"I am voicing the concerns which very many previously Labour supporters said to me on the doorstep. They said this has to be sorted out, things cannot go on like this."
But local government minister Phil Woolas challenged the demands saying the election results should be put into "proper context".
Conservative leader David Cameron described yesterday's reshuffle, in which no less than 14 changes were made, including the sacking of home secretary Charles Clarke, as "pretty desperate stuff".
"I was pressing the prime minister more than a week ago to remove Charles Clarke and he said, ‘no, never’, and now he’s made to do it," he said.
The climb down, he said, would have been "humiliating" for Mr Blair, adding: "What the country needs is not a reshuffle, but a replacement to the government."
Liberal Democrat leader Menzies Campbell said it was time for the prime minister to name a date to step down, insisting: "No amount of cosmetic surgery can disguise the fact that this government has suffered a permanent loss of credibility."
It has also emerged that a draft letter calling on the premier to set a departure timetable is circulating among MPs and it has been signed by about 50.