The Blair Legacy: Not Exactly Piffle

By Joe Klein

It was a day of monumental piffle on the campaign trail in Britain. The Conservative Party announced a major initiative to fight teenage binge drinking, which--given the much celebrated local custom--seemed as likely to succeed as a plan to oppose rain. Not to be outdone, Tony Blair's Labour Party announced an equally major initiative to meet the needs of a new, mythic electoral figure: the Schoolgate Mum, whose desires were said to include better school lunches, athletic activities and access to school nurses. This proved risible even to Labour Party stalwarts. "I thought we were going to call them Schoolgate Nans," said a leading Labour policy thinker, with a giggle. "You know, Mum's off working, so Nana--Grandma--waits for the kids at the school gate." Indeed, the only indication that there might be serious problems in Britain occurred at the periphery of the campaign: masked Islamic extremists invaded a press conference called by the moderate Muslim Council of Britain to discuss election concerns. The interlopers roughed up the group's spokesman and proclaimed that "voting for any political party will guarantee your seat in hellfire forever."

This, then, is Tony Blair's last campaign for Prime Minister. He has won two terms; a third, to match Margaret Thatcher's stern trinity, would be unprecedented for a member of the Labour Party. Win or lose--and he is likely to win--Blair will be remembered as an imposing figure, the man who saved the British left from socialist irrelevance. His "New" Labour has proved a more lasting achievement than Bill Clinton's "New" Democrats. It is a majority party that has combined prudent free-market economics with increased spending on social programs and a notable, if still incomplete, reform of the British welfare state. Yet Blair staggers to the finish line, unloved and untrusted.

"Do you accept that there is a trust issue?" the BBC's Jeremy Paxman asked Blair in an interview last week. Blair agreed but clumsily tried to spin it toward "trusting" Labour to sustain Britain's strong economy. Paxman, a brilliant barracuda, would have none of that: "All right, let's look at Iraq. When you told Parliament that the intelligence was 'extensive, detailed and authoritative,' that wasn't true, was it?" It took Blair some minutes of squirming before he could get around to making the case that Iraq was better off without Saddam, that 8 million Iraqis had voted, but Paxman, like much of the electorate, was unmoved--and unimpressed by Blair's fortitude in sticking to his unpopular position on the war. Most Brits consider the Prime Minister's decision to follow George Bush into Iraq under "false pretenses" weak and mendacious rather than principled. Indeed, Blair's advisers admit they are worried that women, strong Labour supporters in the past, now see the Prime Minister as shifty. Hence, the frantic attempts to salve the wounds of Schoolgate Mums.

Paxman's Iraq foray was rare in this campaign. Trust may be an issue, but Iraq isn't, largely because the Conservative opposition supported the invasion. The Tories are led by Michael Howard, a veteran Thatcherite brought in from the pasture for a last fling. He has chosen to run a campaign that is, by turns, ugly and inane. A prominent Tory told me that Howard is a great believer in the voodoo cooked up by political consultants and has decided to build his campaign around five issues that floated to the surface in focus groups. They are predictably anodyne--more cops, lower taxes--except for one: a tougher line on immigration, an issue that arouses deep passions and therefore needs to be handled delicately. The Tories have not been very delicate. Their remarkable campaign slogan, "Are you thinking what we're thinking?," is meant to be provocative, a sly reference to fears of a flood tide of mask-wearing extremists and veiled women invading England's pale land. If the polls can be believed, fear mongering hasn't helped the Tory effort. The third-place Liberal Democrats are led by Charles Kennedy, who has moved the party from bland moderation to more promising territory on the antiwar left. Kennedy is seen as a charming but puerile fellow, a man who announced his intention to quit smoking, then failed.

That leaves Blair, whose strongest plank in this sad valedictory is the assumption that he will leave office before the next election, handing the job to his longtime deputy, Gordon Brown, the popular Chancellor of the Exchequer. It also leaves a mystery: Blair's odd combination of success and unpopularity. Even before Iraq, the Prime Minister was seen as a cool, distant, slightly dodgy figure. That was due in part to Blair's personality--he is awkward at empathy, his nervous smile six teeth too many--but it is also a consequence of his creed. Blair, like Clinton, is an exemplar of the Third Way, which is not exactly a fighting faith. It is an attempt to take governance seriously, to provide needed services efficiently while removing the crushing indifference and incompetence of industrial-age bureaucracy.

This is not the stuff of high drama or splashy legacy. It is the stuff--well, all right--of more nutritious school lunches.