BRITISH END CAMPAIGN, LABOR LEADS : CONSERVATIVES LIKELY OUT AFTER 18 YEARS.

Byline: Warren Hoge The New York Times

Britain's election campaign came to an end Wednesday night with the refashioned Labor Party of its young leader, Tony Blair, maintaining its substantial lead in the polls and threatening a rout of the long-dominant Conservative Party showing the wear of 18 years in office.

While the possible change of administration from Conservative to the newly centrist Labor Party would not mean a radical change in the way Britain is run, a victory of the proportions being predicted would significantly shift the country's political landscape.

The Labor Party approaches election day unified, full of fresh energy and disposed to take center stage, while the Tories are divided, depleted, and facing a bruising and distracting struggle for leadership of the party if they lose.

``I understand why some people may find the argument for change attractive,'' Prime Minister John Major, 54, said at a news conference at party headquarters Wednesday. ``Eighteen years is a long time,'' he said, sensing the obstacle he has been unable to overcome in the six weeks of electioneering. ``The electorate knows us, warts and all.''

Six weeks is also a long time for a British election campaign - the last one of that duration was in 1918 - and Major had scheduled it that way in the hopes that with enough time the public would start to credit his government with the country's economic recovery and return the Conservatives for a fifth term.

Everyone with an opinion at the outset thought the tactic would surely reduce Labor's lead, if not overcome it, but the numbers never budged and Major's opponents put the extra time to their own use, convincing the voters worried about Labor's convulsive past that responsible ``New Labor,'' as Blair calls it, was here to stay.

Under Blair, 43, the Labor Party has been profoundly transformed, abandoning its trade union, statist past and becoming a champion of entrepreneurship and individual enterprise. The goal of the project has always been to make Labor, a party that has never succeeded in holding office for more than one term, into an acceptable mainstream alternative to the Conservatives, who have governed Britain for 35 of the past 50 years.

Blair has visibly gained confidence and stature in the past six weeks, and Major has seen his leadership undermined by members of Parliament caught in sexual and petty corruption episodes and candidates defying his ``wait and see'' position on Britain's ties to Europe.

Meanwhile, Labor was running a campaign using American promotional and organization techniques crafted to be disciplined, nonprovocative and low-risk. Labor some time ago ceased to be the party of cloth caps, beer and sausages, and, as the campaign wore on, even its signature red color became a soothing purple.

As strait-laced as their candidate, campaign workers made pledges of abstinence for the duration of the campaign, and the strategy manual preached ``Remind, Reassure and Reward'' - recited by campaign aides with no evident self-consciousness.

On Wednesday, Major expressed his frustration with the stylized campaign's apparent success, saying voters should not fall for ``the false attraction of a well-packaged marketing scam.'' He also said that the prosperity under the Tories was ``too good to give up'' and that ``one cross in the wrong place on the ballot paper tomorrow could wreck everything we have achieved together.''

Blair ended his campaign the way he began it, with a visit to a school, in keeping with his handlers' eagerness to stress his commitment to improving education. Then he went to his northern England constituency of Sedgefield, where he said at his political club that the country now had ``24 hours to build that great, decent British society.''

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Photo

PHOTO British Labor Party leader Tony Blair, center, clasps hands with supporters during a campaign stop Wednesday in Stockton, England.

Associated Press