The Heart Of Labour

As heart procedures go, a “catheter ablation” is good news: using local anesthetic, a tiny probe is threaded through the arteries to the interior of the heart, where it zaps a few cells that have occasionally been making the heart beat too fast. British Prime Minister Tony Blair had one last Friday and was back at Downing Street by dinnertime, still planning to fly to Africa for a conference this week, and facing a better than 90% chance that his irregular rhythm won’t recur.

But Blair’s encounter with the doctors is like the other good news he’s been getting lately: mixed at best. His Labour Party won an important by-election last week (he cannily announced his trip to the hospital as the polls closed), driving the opposition Conservatives into a miserable fourth place behind the Liberal Democrats and the U.K. Independence Party, but still suffering a big drop in its own votes compared to the last general election. Last week at Labour’s annual conference, a forum where Blair usually shines, he had to placate grumpy delegates with a tepid semi-apology for the Iraq war; “I acknowledge and accept” that the intelligence about weapons of mass destruction was wrong, he said, but “I can’t, sincerely at least, apologize for removing Saddam.” As one M.P. said, “I wasn’t inspired” — and this was the kickoff for a general election expected next year.

More video footage of British hostage Kenneth Bigley pleading for Blair’s help, this time wearing a Guantánamo-style orange jumpsuit in a cage, kept Iraq’s chaos in the newspapers. The cumulative burdens helped explain Blair’s surprise pre-operative pledge to quit before the end of his next term — assuming he gets re-elected — probably around his 10-year mark in office. This officially starts his transformation to lame duck. At least he’ll have somewhere to retreat to: the Blairs have just bought a $6.5 million house in a posh London neighborhood.