Heaven knows, I have not exactly been an unalloyed fan of Tony Blair. But I agree with Steve Richards in today’s Independent (subscription only) that the Labour party has simply gone stark, staring mad. The attempt to force the Prime Minister out of office has now reached hysteria pitch, with hitherto loyal Blairites apparently signing a letter telling him: ‘In the name of God, go!’

But pinch yourself — he’s already said he’s going. He said, months ago, that he would stand down before the next general election, and that he would give his successor as leader of the party and Prime Minister ample time to bed in before fighting that election. (That announcement was surely the most stupid mistake the normally supremely adroit Blair has ever made, since it was always bound to create precisely what has now developed — a clamour to know The Date of his departure; but he knows that if he were to announce such a date, there would promptly be a clamour for him to go immediately, since the already lame duck Prime Minister would then be a dead duck).

So what’s the rush? Why does his party, both friend and foe, want him to go right now? What is the political crime he has committed that is so heinous he must depart forthwith? Without doubt, his government is held in the deepest contempt; and the party is spooked because the Conservatives, under their genial, relaxed, new young leader David Cameron, have moved ahead in the polls (although the first flush of adulation for the said young leader appears to be waning somewhat). On the domestic front, nothing works and billions of pounds are being wasted because Her Majesty’s Government has simply collapsed into terminal incompetence. Granted. But Blair’s most trumpeted successor, Gordon Brown, is as responsible for this wholesale administrative debacle — indeed, in certain key respects arguably more so — as is Blair. The government’s real problem is not Blair, but the fact that its whole third way ‘project’ has run out of steam — or, to be more precise, has now shown that it never possessed any productive source of energy at all, but was always just smoke and mirrors.

Yet that still doesn’t explain the exit frenzy gripping the party just over a year after Blair led it to a historic third election victory. Such a triumph has been vitiated by the real poison in British politics, the war in Iraq and Blair’s support for American foreign policy, President Bush and Israel. This is what’s really driving the comrades demented. It’s impossible to exaggerate the climate of virulent anti-Americanism and hatred of Israel which, extending way beyond the left into the centrist heartlands of Middle Britain, has so distorted British politics — and indeed, all but destroyed British rationality.

Even so, one might reasonably ask — what’s new? Iraq was a running sore at the last election and yet Blair still won it. So what’s changed? The only development on that front has been last month’s Lebanon war, and it is this which appears to have lit the fuse for the current frenzy. The comrades went ballistic because Blair refused to break with Bush and call for an immediate ‘cease-fire’ at an early stage in the war. The fact that all right-thinking people including Blair and Bush were calling upon Hezbollah, which had started the firing, to cease doing so did not, of course, count; the ‘cease-fire’ in question merely meant telling Israel to stop firing back in self-defence. So the British Prime Minister must now be forced out of office by his ‘progressive’ colleagues — for refusing to bring about the surrender of the only democracy in the Middle East to the forces of Islamic genocidal fascism. Surreal, or what?

Blair came to power back in 1997 by effectively signalling to the nation that he would govern the country over the heads of his Labour party, which everyone knew was an unelectable rabble. What is now clear is that, over the past nine years, that situation has not altered one iota. Blair has not changed his party. It has not become any more mature or less ideological. Just as he did in 1997, Blair continues to float above it as a disembodied political presence who was only ever tolerated because of his awesome gift in winning elections. Now that gift appears to have deserted him, his party is trying desperately to float him off altogether into the upper stratosphere of the celestial third way while it gets back to the interrupted business of being unelectable. ‘We can’t go on like this’ one Labour MP — a Blairite, to boot —was reported as saying as a reason for ousting his erstwhile hero. But the ‘this’ that is causing the current crisis is a hysteria created entirely by the Labour MPs themselves.

The fact is that party rules mean that Blair cannot realistically be forced out. He may decide he has had enough of all this and jack it in, but that doesn’t seem very likely; it wouldn’t surprise me if he stayed on as Prime Minister beyond his purported sell-by date of autumn 2007. But go he will, sooner or later.

The crucial question at this point in world history is whether the British government post-Blair will be as staunchly Atlanticist as he has been. The Tories have become alarmingly flaky in this regard, although a fight to resolve this within the party has yet to take place. Gordon Brown is known to have stars and stripes in his eyes, although ominously he has also let it be known that he would ditch support for certain aspects of US policy. For all his faults, Blair has displayed astounding courage and clear-mindedness in never wavering from his support for American foreign policy, despite the fury this has engendered among the voters and the consequent damage this has done to his whole political career. The key issue now in British politics is whether his successor — whoever it will be — will do the same.