This piece of mine appears in today's Wall Street Journal Europe:

What do Margaret Thatcher, John Major and Tony Blair have in common? One of them may still be prime minister, but none of them now exercises real power.

From the moment Mr. Blair announced before the 2005 general election that, if he was put back in at 10 Downing Street, he would not contest another vote, he became a lame duck. When Mr. Blair confirmed yesterday that he plans to leave office next summer, it was in one sense nothing new. Anyone you care to ask on the street has assumed all along that is when he will go.

But in political terms it’s as big as it gets. Simply by saying he will be gone for sure within a year, Mr. Blair has also confirmed that he is now impotent and at the mercy of his party. There has barely been a day since his re-election last year when Mr. Blair has not been asked the same question: When exactly are you going? And every time he has been asked, the prime minister has said the same thing in response: That he has pledged not to fight another election and that is all he is prepared to say. Only last Friday, in an interview with The Times, he repeated the formula: “I have said I am not fighting the next election and I will leave ample time for my successor.” Of timing there was, as always, nothing.

That interview turned out to be one obfuscation too far. Instead of dampening down the departure issue, as the prime minister no doubt intended, it forced him to talk about it and, almost certainly, will bring about an earlier departure.

You can tell when a political party in chaos becomes one in crisis. Up pop the nonentity MPs on the rolling news channels, sharing their views on the future of their leader. And in the past few days it’s been impossible to escape them, as they have lined up to attack or—in a very few cases—defend Mr. Blair.

There is no doubt that it will be Gordon Brown who takes over from Mr. Blair. But with every passing day, the inheritance left to him is getting steadily worse as the party rips apart the last vestiges of its reputation for discipline and order in front of our eyes.

Instead of stating straight away this week that he stood behind Mr. Blair, and stamping on the indiscipline, Mr. Brown waited until yesterday — after days of public infighting — to say that he stood behind him and that “this cannot and should not be about private arrangements but what is in the best interests of our party, and most of all the best interests of our country — and I will support him in doing exactly that.” Hardly a ringing endorsement. Yet of all the lessons Labour learned from the Conservatives under John Major, it was that the electorate has contempt for a party which cannot behave itself. The legacy of Conservative division in the 1990s has been its three election defeats. Once voters get the impression of division, it can take years to shake off.

Despite Mr. Blair’s attempts yesterday to end the crisis, he is attempting to put out a forest fire with a bottle of water. The prime minister may have quieted things for a while, but he has done nothing to alter the bigger picture of open and accelerating hostility to him.

Mr. Blair has spent his entire time as Labour leader as an outsider in his own party, loathed by most of its faithful. As a record-breaking election winner, however, they had no choice but to put up with him, if for no other reason than self-interest. He might not have believed what they believed — Mr. Blair thought, heavens above, that profit was a good thing! — but he could deliver power. So they entered into a Faustian pact, to back him as leader if he could taken them into government. Now the terms of that deal have come back to haunt Mr Blair. He cannot, having pledged to go, win another victory. So, at a stroke, the reason for tolerating him has gone, and a largely unreconstructed Labour, absent the New adjective, is baying for his departure.

Worse still, from the MPs’ point of view, Labour’s 31% poll ratings are at their lowest level for 19 years, and the Conservatives’ are soaring. Defeat stares MPs in the face, especially those in constituencies with the smallest majorities who are, having been elected by the Blair Effect, Blairites. Previously loyal Blairites fear for their careers, and have started turning on him. They want a new face at the head.

It is typical of Mr. Blair’s innate political skills that, even at his most politically damaged, he demonstrated with his first sentence yesterday that he is more in touch in with the public than any of his backstabbing MPs. By starting off with an apology to the British public “for the past week,” he distanced himself from their immaturity and showed at a stroke that in their rampage to remove him, they will lose Labour’s greatest asset. They will sow what they reap.