Frank Dobson emerged victorious from Labour's electoral college yesterday, and was promptly invited to "consider his position" amid charges that the party's mayoral nomination had been "stolen".
Welcome to party democracy New Labour style - where the leadership carves up the vote and contrives to hand the moral victory to the darling of the Old Labour left.
If that was the sum total of the damage, Mr Blair might rest easy. But while he fervently hopes, the Prime Minister must know that Mr Dobson's 3 per cent victory margin over Ken Livingstone may prove nowhere near sufficient.
At one level, barely yet remarked upon, the party's protracted nomination battle for Mayor of London - and the popular preference for Mr Livingstone - raises big questions about the extent to which Mr Blair really has transformed his party.
The immediate fear is that a discredited selection process may have given Mr Livingstone the pretext for a solo run - raising the prospect of a damaging defeat for Mr Blair and his candidate in May.
New Labour, we were told, marked a decisive break with the "looney" past; a healthy, modern, internal democracy where the days of block votes cast by union barons in smoke-filled rooms would give way to one-member one-vote, and true government for the people by the people.
Wherever they were allowed to do so, Labour people spoke - and voted - for the candidate of their choice. "At a rough estimate, a total of 80,000 people have voted for me in all sections of the electoral college, compared to 25,000 for Frank," declared Mr Livingstone. But his margin of popular advantage was not enough.
No matter that he took 71 per cent of the first preference votes in the trade union and affiliated bodies sector, or that 54.9 per cent of constituency members backed him against 35.3 per cent for Mr Dobson. The MPs, MEPs and Greater London Assembly candidates knew what they had to do, backing Mr Dobson by 86.5 per cent to 12.2 per cent for Mr Livingstone.
Following the elimination of Ms Jackson, this gave Mr Dobson 51.53 per cent to Mr Livingstone's 48.47 per cent of the total vote.
Ministers and Blairite backbenchers had lined up before the event to insist that "Red Ken" had known the rules up-front and could hardly cry foul once beaten. But any quaint notion that Mr Livingstone would gracefully quit the stage was instantly dispelled.
The result, he declared, had been delivered for Mr Dobson by one trade union boss, one retired MEP and one small co-op branch which had declined to ballot its members.
Specifically, he said, Mr Dobson's winning margin "was based on the fact that 8 per cent of the college was voted by Sir Ken Jackson and the South London Co-op, who refused to allow their members to cast their own votes."
Claiming the "democratic mandate", Mr Livingstone urged his supporters to stay inside the Labour Party "to ensure nothing like this ever happens again." But that was not to be construed as a last word about his own intentions.
He said Mr Dobson had now to decide whether to accept this "tainted" result, or stand down "in the interests of Labour and London."
Mr Livingstone spelt the message out: "There must now be a serious question over whether Frank can hope to beat Steven Norris (the Conservative candidate) on May 4th, when Londoners will widely perceive the Labour nomination to have been stolen. The lesson of Wales is that our voters will not be taken for granted."
He went on: "A Labour campaign that was dead in the water from day one will limp on to polling day, and never allow us to get to the real issues that matter to Londoners, such as transport, unemployment and crime."
In other words, `Let me run, or you lose.'
Giving Mr Dobson a few days in which to consider his position, Mr Livingstone said he would say nothing more until he had listened to those Londoners themselves. Mr Blair can only dread what they might tell him.
