LONDON: Tony Blair’s strongest supporters on Sunday sue for peace with Gordon Brown as they declare their political idol is ‘history’ and pledge to throw their weight behind the British prime minister in the face of a resurgent opposition Conservative party.

In a sign of the grave threat facing the Labour party in 2008 — dubbed its ‘most challenging year’ since the 1992 election defeat — the Blair fan club announces that anyone seeking a Labour victory must offer unequivocal support for Brown.

‘Tony Blair is history,’ the former Blairite cabinet minister Stephen Byers writes in a remarkably frank article in today’s Observer newspaper. ‘He is the political past and will not be part of the future of domestic politics in our country.

‘2008 will be a tough year. With Tony Blair gone from domestic politics, the task of leading Labour to victory falls to Gordon Brown. It is the responsibility of all of us who want to see a fourth election victory to give him our support.’

The intervention by Byers, who spoke to the other close allies of Blair, Charles Clarke and Alan Milburn, about his article, is the most dramatic attempt to draw a line under divisions which destabilised the Labour party during the Blair era. It comes after Labour MPs warned Brown that he must improve his performance in the new year if Labour is to avoid handing the Tories, as the Conservatives are also known, an easy — and symbolically significant — win in Brown’s first main electoral test in May’s local elections.

Blair issued firm instructions to his supporters ‘not to rock the boat’ and to support Brown. The former prime minister passed on the message after The Observer reported in mid-October that the three Blairites were planning to warn Brown that he was in danger of abandoning Middle Britain.

Byers makes clear in today’s article that Blair, now the Middle East peace envoy who bowed out of British politics on the day he stood down as prime minister when he resigned as an MP, expects total loyalty to Brown.

‘In the six months since he left Downing Street, Tony Blair has made it absolutely clear — both publicly and privately — that he has no intention of following the route taken by Margaret Thatcher and becoming a back-seat driver, expressing an opinion on every significant policy debate. ‘This means that each issue Labour has to deal with no longer has to be seen through the Blair-Brown prism. Such a new freedom places a responsibility on all of us to resist fighting old battles or revisiting past divisions.’

The intervention by Byers today marks the first in a series of reappearances on the national stage by Tony Blair’s former supporters, who have been wary of courting publicity in the six months since the former Prime Minister stood down on June 27. David Blunkett, the former Home Secretary (interior minister), will launch a pamphlet on social mobility early next month, while Milburn will deliver a speech on public sector reform.

The Blairites are keen to speak out now, because they fear that Labour MPs on the left of the party — led by the former deputy leadership contender Jon Cruddas — are setting the government agenda.

In carefully coded language, Byers says that Brown needs to be careful not just to talk about his core areas of social justice and fairness.

‘Motivating the core, traditional supporter to go out and vote... on its own will not be enough,’ Byers writes. ‘We also have to appeal to the promiscuous voter by demonstrating that we can be the party of aspiration and ambition as well as social justice and fairness.’—Dawn/Observer News Service