With its promise of nearly 50 bills to be brought before Par-liament over the next 18 months, this week's Queen's Speech was billed as a determined attempt by Tony Blair to demonstrate that the loss of his towering majority has done nothing to sap the government's vigour. The programme, said Mr Blair, was "quintessentially New Labour". But to many of the MPS listening, the frenzy of legislative activity spoke more of a prime minister who is desperate to secure his legacy, but who knows his time is running out. Ever since Mr Blair won his third election victory, the talk has been of when he would stand down and how much in his newly straitened circumstances he could get done before he went. Each proposed bill is being carefully inspected for its prospects of surviving the expected rebellions by dissident Labour MPS, any one of which could bring the prime minister crashing down. Those impatient for Mr Blair to go compare his loss of authority to that of John Major after the pound's ejection from Europe's currency system, when he was said to be "in office, but not in power".
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