JUST LIKE BILL?

By BARRY HILLENBRAND AND MICHAEL KRAMER/LONDON

It didn't take a politician of Churchillian stature to figure out what needed doing. The Labour Party hadn't won a national election in Britain for 23 years. Its tattered platform of watered-down Bolshevism had become as irrelevant as the suits of armor in the Tower of London.

No one will probably mistake him for Churchill, but when Tony Blair grabbed the leadership of the Labourites in 1994, he trashed the old lefties and jerked the party into the post-ideological center. And now he is on a roll. He may even be unstoppable. If the polls are accurate, and they have been remarkably consistent for months, Britain on May 1 will have its first Labour Party Prime Minister since James Callaghan lost to Margaret Thatcher in 1979.

Political success is often accidental (Blair took command after his predecessor died of a heart attack), but it also comes from calculation. Just as Bill Clinton reinvented himself as a New Democrat to capture the White House in 1992, and then as a reborn centrist to win a second term last year, Blair has retooled Labour so that it sometimes seems like nothing but a more caring version of Toryism. Gone are the old socialist slogans. Gone is the pledge to redistribute income and nationalize industries. Blair calls his party "new Labour." His opponent, Conservative Prime Minister John Major, describes it as "really pretty much us."

To thwart what seems inevitable, Major's troops have turned to the same weapon George Bush wielded unsuccessfully against Clinton. Blair, they charge, is merely an opportunist, a leftist in middle-of-the-road campaign clothing. "With Labour taking many of our positions and all of those that are most important," says Tory strategist Andrew Cooper, "fear is all we've got left. We've got to try and cause people to worry that Tony's changes are just for show, to fear his change rather than welcome him as a nonthreatening crypto-Conservative they can comfortably take a risk on. It hasn't been easy."

Which is putting it mildly. Blair isn't as publicly empathetic as Clinton, but as he demonstrated in late March, he is equally deft. The Tories had claimed "proof" that Blair was secretly planning to restore union power once in office. For many in Britain, calling someone a closet union lover is like saying in the U.S. that someone is soft on crime. Thatcher rode to Downing Street on a promise to curb union influence. If it worked for the Iron Lady, Major's camp figured, why not try it again? Trouble is, Blair's view that employees should be permitted to join a union if a majority vote to do so is neither new nor particularly objectionable. Still, Blair reasoned, simply stating the facts might not do the trick--and he dearly wanted to spike the Tory attack since it struck at the very heart of his hard-won Labour Party reforms.

So Blair reached across the Atlantic for cover. But not to Clinton, whose tactics, strategy and substantive prescriptions he has occasionally borrowed and with whom he is often compared. No, this time Blair went for the big embrace, straight past Clinton to Thatcher's old ideological soul mate Ronald Reagan.

With the red-rose symbol of new Labour behind him, Blair responded, "If a majority wants to be in a union, they should be allowed to do so, just like in the United States. Even Ronald Reagan was for majority rule. He spoke of workers having a choice, and no one ever suggested that Ronald Reagan was a pig. Ronald Reagan was against the closed shop, as am I."

Within a day, the charge that seemed so threatening had evaporated. "He's very good, isn't he?" mumbled Thatcher admiringly. "He certainly knows damage control."

No one doubts that Blair is clever. Like centrist politicians everywhere, he's adept at embracing prevailing sentiments. By definition, though, the pursuit of centrism often involves following rather than leading. The question then is whether such centrists actually believe what they say and whether their actions in office will conform to their rhetoric. One always wonders whether they're tough enough to arbitrate among competing concerns and constituencies. Often the test comes when the only clean way out of a tangle demands saying no to those who will be offended by a particular decision. Whether Blair passes this test remains to be seen. Certainly, the foreign politician he most admires, Bill Clinton, has failed it on innumerable occasions.

As for his immediate task--getting elected--Blair has proved conclusively that he knows exactly what's worked for Margaret Thatcher and John Major. He has singlemindedly refashioned Labour to contest for the leadership of modern Britain, and done so largely by grafting the most popular and successful Tory program planks onto Labour's manifesto, which means Labour is fairly seen as a Tory clone. Thatcher's success, especially, made reforming Labour both necessary and possible, and she regularly complains about a "conversion of convenience" while insisting that "imitations are still fake." Newspapers like the Independent rail about new Labour's "miserable, defensive me-tooism."

Blair is unapologetic. "It is not a sin to want to be elected," he says. "Unless you're elected, you can't do a damn thing for anybody." Those who seek office, he knows, aren't shy about accommodating reality, and the realities have changed rapidly in Britain. Large chunks of the old working class have advanced into the middle class. Union membership, the bedrock Labour constituency, has dropped from 53% in 1980 to 32% in 1994. Many voters who once cast their ballots for Labour on the basis of a tribal instinct to support their similarly situated comrades floated to the Conservatives in the 1980s. But like Clinton, who wooed back the Reagan Democrats, Blair is leading because he is recapturing those Labour voters who strayed to the Tories as their wallets thickened. It is hardly surprising, then, to hear Blair say that he is not "about to press the rewind button and return to the 1970s" or that he believes "Margaret Thatcher's emphasis on free enterprise was right."

New Labour now embraces capitalism, free markets and privatization. Most extraordinarily, in its effort to appear fiscally responsible, it has agreed to follow the Major government's spending commitments for two years and to refrain from raising income taxes. Once in power, Labour would thus be defined mostly by what it will not do: it will not increase taxes; it will not increase public spending; it will not renationalize companies privatized under Thatcher and Major; and it will not, Blair intones endlessly, restore union power. Thatcherism has been confirmed as the new Natural Law.

Major, like the Republicans who moan that Clinton has stolen their ideas, denounces the imitation as insincere. "Tony Blair will say whatever he has to," says the Prime Minister. "For him, nothing is sacred." Not only have Major's gibes failed to reduce significantly Labour's big lead in the polls, but Blair has shrewdly turned his party's conversions to rhetorical advantage. When the Conservatives "go on about U-turns," Blair said recently, "they simply underline the fact that new Labour is new."

While Blair seems content with the perception that nothing much will really change if he wins, there are still the questions of where this telegenic 43-year-old came from and, more important, whether he can be truly trusted to govern as he has campaigned.

Blair's comfortable upbringing means his politics aren't grounded in the old class resentments that animated Labour leaders before him. Yet he has known heartbreak and hardship. When Tony was only 11, his father, a law professor, suffered a serious stroke just as he was about to run for Parliament as a Conservative. With his father disabled, Blair received scholarship help to attend a tony prep school in Scotland. He did well enough there to pass the tough exams for Oxford in 1972, where he showed little interest in politics. He studied law, but is remembered most for his gyrating performances as bass guitarist and lead singer in a rock band called the Ugly Rumours. With his full mouth and toothy grin, Blair looked a bit like Mick Jagger and managed a passable rendition of Honky Tonk Woman. On Sundays, however, he attended services in the chapel and became a committed Christian.

It was religion that ultimately led Blair to politics. Interested mostly in the social gospel, he was heavily influenced by John Macmurray, a Scottish philosopher who wrote that Christians have a positive obligation to work toward improving society--the communitarian notion he still trumpets regularly. Blair nevertheless rarely speaks about his faith in public, refrains from ending speeches with "God bless you" and never attends high-profile prayer breakfasts with prominent religious figures. When asked by TIME if he is religious, Blair, who normally speaks in well-constructed, seamless paragraphs, became inarticulate: "I am, but I don't...you know...every time I talk about it...it's just...I don't want to...my, er, my religious convictions have nothing to do with why people should vote for me."

In 1975 Blair finished his law degree, moved to London and joined the Labour Party at the nadir of its popularity. He says he shared its underlying beliefs: "If I'd simply wanted a career in politics, I would have joined the Tories." Blair had met his future wife Cherie Booth while working as a lawyer, and both ran for Parliament in 1983. Cherie lost and soon dropped out of active politics. Her legal career prospered, and she was recently named Legal Personality of the Year by her peers, the first woman ever to win the prestigious title.

Despite the obvious similarities, Cherie is no Hillary Rodham Clinton. She gives no speeches and grants no interviews. If the Blairs move to Downing Street, Cherie will continue working. In Britain the concept of "First Lady" is alien. It's the Queen, as head of state, who serves as the nation's official hostess.

Although Cherie lost her 1983 bid for a seat in the Commons, Tony won--and knew precisely what he wanted to do when he got there. "He was a modernizer from the beginning," says Tony Banks, a Labour M.P. who has fought Blair's changes. "I remember hearing him talk and thinking, 'You ain't getting anywhere with those ideas, kid.' But now Blair is doing things that politicians I grew up with would never have dared to even think about."

It took only four years for Blair to gain traction. When Labour fell to Thatcher for a third time in a stunning 1987 defeat, Neil Kinnock, something of a modernizer himself, took charge, and Blair rode along. After becoming shadow employment secretary in 1989, Blair had the task of telling the unions that Labour would thereafter support the right of workers not to join a union. As shadow home secretary, he convinced the party of the need for harsher penalties for criminals and greater support of the police. In that job his flair for the double-edged sound bite surfaced. It was he who coined the slogan so many Britons find fetching: "Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime."

In both shadow positions Blair angered the Old Guard. His most convincing demonstration of toughness came in 1995, when as the new party leader he took on the Labour Constitution's nearly sacred Clause IV. Drafted in 1918, the clause advocated the "common ownership of the means of production, distribution, and exchange." This not only was the clarion call of socialism; it also represented a Utopian commitment to radical social change. For many, Clause IV, proudly printed on the back of the party membership card, was exactly what Labour was all about.

Blair saw it differently. He said at the time that "it was absurd that the one guiding value the Labour Party has in its constitution is wholesale nationalization, when, in fact, the party no longer believes in it." He traveled the country selling his view and was again vigorously opposed by the unions. "We didn't like the idea that Blair was hijacking the party by changing Clause IV," says John Cogger, president of the National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers. "It's our party, created by my union in 1899." It took two tries, but Blair finally won. Instantly, the man some thought of as smarmy and whom the press had nicknamed "Bambi" instead became known to his party opponents as Stalin. Today the prospect of victory mutes all criticism. "You will not see any hostility between the trade-union leaders and Blair either publicly or behind closed doors," says Cogger, "because it is so important to win this election."

With Labour's leadership in hand, Blair began borrowing from abroad. The shift toward the center by left-leaning political parties is a worldwide phenomenon, and Blair has gone to school primarily on the examples offered in Australia and the U.S., both of which he has visited and whose centrist politicians he knows well. In Australia, Blair was charmed by Robert Hawke, who had said when he was Prime Minister that "you have to be an idiot or just plain blind with prejudice not to understand that you've got to have a healthy and growing private sector if you're going to look after the majority of the people." Blair's version goes like this: "It is the public interest that is important. What counts is what works. The presumption should be that economic activity is best left to the private sector."

Blair's appropriations from America have included the need to get tough on crime, the desire to end welfare as a lifelong entitlement and some of the notions associated with Clintonomics. After visiting the President and his aides in January 1993 (a trip that included stopping by the Democratic Leadership Council, from which much of Clinton's platform emerged), Blair began peppering his speeches with attacks on "trickle down" economics. Both men speak about most people having six or seven jobs in a lifetime instead of just one, which has led Blair to favor the kind of education and training reforms Clinton has pushed in the U.S. Only a scholastic can tell whether it's Clinton or Blair speaking when the Labour leader says, "The countries that will achieve the highest rates of growth and employment in the new information age are those which make the investments in the new technologies and skills...and whose governments see their role as working with industry to equip people for change." The same similarities surface when Blair talks about "rights and duties going together." Or when he says he wants welfare to be "a hand up, not just a handout." Or when he goes on about charting a political path that "is between and ahead of the old left and the new right." On at least one occasion, Blair was actually first with the cliche. Two months before Clinton uttered a virtually identical formulation in his 1996 State of the Union address, Blair said, "The era of centralized government is over."

While much of Blair's rhetoric and many of his proposed programs resemble Clinton's, the Blair team has borrowed most heavily the campaign tactics that the President has used successfully twice. Several Labour operatives worked in the Clinton 1992 campaign and produced a confidential memo detailing "lessons learned." They urged Blair to ape Clinton's vaunted "rapid response" operation, its extensive phone banking and--thanks to the President's '92 pollster, Stan Greenberg (who is currently working with Labour)--more sophisticated survey techniques than were then common in Britain. "I'd say the most valuable things we've learned from the Americans are the need to respond instantly to any and all attacks and the imperative to stay 'on message,'" says Gordon Brown, Labour's shadow chancellor of the exchequer. "There's been a huge back-and-forth. It's been very productive."

In addition to employing Greenberg, the Blair team is in frequent phone contact with people such as George Stephanopoulos and James Carville, perhaps the two most important cogs in Clinton's '92 campaign. The most recent personal contact occurred last December, when three Blair assistants took a suite at the Hay Adams hotel in Washington to speak with such White House aides as Rahm Emanuel and Don Baer and close Clinton confidants, including Mark Penn, whose brilliant work helped reposition Clinton to win last fall. "Mostly," says Baer, "the Brits this time were interested mainly in tactics, like how their war room should be set up, as if it alone, without the substance, was the secret to victory." Another Clinton associate debriefed by Blair's men says, "They had stolen all our ideas earlier. This time they were intrigued by things like how we put the train trip together during last summer's convention." It was "what I would call due diligence," says Penn. "They wanted to scoop up whatever they could and were a bit cocky about it."

In the great ideological swap shop that politics has become, Blair hardly stands out as an egregious idea thief. Everywhere, everyone appropriates whatever he thinks can help him win. What then? How does one govern once the triumph is secured?

The Tory answer is, "Why wonder?" Among Conservatives, it's called the "Coke strategy," and John Major puts it this way: "If you have to choose between a real Conservative Party and a quasi-Conservative Party, where Labour says one thing but the party's heart and soul is elsewhere, then I believe people will go for the real thing."

But there is a difference, Blair insists, no matter that Labour has accepted the Tories' spending limits and some of their taxation policies. "The values that still motivate people like me are different than the ones that motivate the Conservative Party," Blair told Time. "Some of our policies may overlap. Fine. They will [because] there is no longer an ideological war to the death. [But] I believe the real task of a left-of-center party is not just to carry on" as the Tories have. "The real task is to reallocate those resources, which is, in a sense, to get back to the first task of what public spending is all about."

Blair is right, of course. Priorities count; details matter. But he has been maddeningly unspecific about many of those details and priorities. Maybe so, Blair would probably say, but the key is to get elected first. If Clinton had to become the acceptable face of Reaganism to reach the White House, so Blair is willing to become the acceptable face of Thatcherism to reach No. 10. Yet cloning has its limits, and Blair knows them well. He understands what happens when the dissonance between campaigning and governing becomes too great. Asked about the Republicans' 1994 midterm sweep, Blair suggested Clinton lacked the will to pursue the New Democrat policies on which he ran. "You don't run on one basis and govern on another," he said.

It may be that fiscal constraints everywhere mean that even the most creative politicians can be little more than good managers. Still, choices must be made, and to win, Blair has glossed over some of the divisions in his own party. Gordon Brown and Labour's deputy leader, John Prescott, for example, hold opposite views on the need for continued privatization. And as the gap in income inequality grows in Britain, the debate over mitigating the disparities will surely become heated.

Britain has a tradition of collective Cabinet leadership. Whether Blair, like Thatcher, can or will browbeat his colleagues is unknown. And even if he does, to what end? Blair's career thus far suggests a capacity for ruthlessness, and he often recalls the question asked by a G.O.P. speaker at the 1984 Republican Convention: "When was the last time you heard a Democrat say no?" That, says Blair, was "too close to the truth for comfort."

And that may be the best hope Britain has. For unlike Clinton, who famously seeks love and approval and alters his stance to get them, Blair's own ideological history is consistent. He has said more than once that "even if we could win as old Labour, we shouldn't."

More significant, Blair has proved self-assured enough to say no when necessary. New Labour wouldn't be new if he hadn't, and wouldn't be on the verge of victory otherwise.

Two years ago, well before the current campaign began, Blair visited a small town in northeastern England and spoke with a group of parents out of camera range. A mother asked whether a Labour government would fund a badly needed special-education teacher at her son's school. The easy answer--the Clinton answer--would have been yes. Blair looked the mom in the eye and expressed sympathy. Then he asked her to understand that resources are limited and that not even a Labour government, which will make education its top priority, can do everything. No, he said, he would not promise her a new teacher. If the man who probably will be Prime Minister next week follows his own example, a new era in British politics may begin. Tony Blair will have become the real thing.