Blair's victory: Labour's love lost.

Unlike elected presidents, British prime ministers get where they are by being leader of the largest party in the House of Commons. The only people who vote directly for Tony Blair are his constituents at Sedgefield, a safe Labour seat in northeast England. Inevitably, though, Blair's personality and his decisions played a central part in the recent British election. His government wanted to campaign on its domestic record: the economy has been in good shape for several years, with high employment and low inflation. There is, as the saying goes, a lot of money about (though more of it is in private pockets than in public resources) and a palpable feel-good factor. Though not radically reformist, the Blair government has steadily introduced social-democratic measures, with improvements in child welfare, education, pensions, employment rights, and the national health service.

The Conservative leader, Michael Howard, fought an aggressive campaign, directed by a spinmaster imported from the Australian Right. The approach was xenophobic and potentially racist, exploiting public fears about immigration and asylum seekers, though in fact the Labour government's policy on these questions is strict enough to cause much unease about human rights. The Conservatives employed an unpleasantly insinuating slogan, "Are You Thinking What I'm Thinking?" (The Labour one was simply moronic, "Forward Not Back"). The horrific idea of Michael Howard as prime minister was exploited by Labour to get their reluctant supporters to vote; in the final days, Labour's message was that it was in real danger of losing, though this was never likely, given Labour's initial huge majority. Labour wanted to campaign on its acknowledged competence as a government and on its social achievements. But the badly timed release of documents concerning the ambiguous legal advice Blair had received in 2003 about the legality of going to war with Iraq put that issue right back into the campaign. Though most Conservatives had supported the war (a minority were opposed to it as not in British interests), Howard opportunistically claimed that Blair had deceived the country about weapons of mass destruction and was to be condemned as a liar, which is what many critics on the left have been saying about him.

If Blair had been a liar he would not have been the first politician about whom that could be said. In fact, I do not think he is, in the sense of deliberately saying what he knows to be false. His is a more complex case: someone who is convinced that he always tells the truth and so is incapable of lying. More bluntly, he believes that if he says a thing it must be true. Blair is a consummate politician, the first Labour leader to take his party to a third successive victory. But he is a vain and self-righteous man, who, like many long-serving leaders, has only a weak grasp of reality outside the political arena. On the face of it, he lost his political touch when he gave unqualified support to President George W. Bush's war. In the election the Labour leadership took the line that different opinions are possible about the war, even that mistakes may have been made, but that it was time to draw a line under it and move on, bearing in mind Labour's positive domestic achievements and policies. Some prominent Labour figures who had opposed the war took this position in the interests of party unity.

Many voters were disinclined to draw that line. Even if they had no interest in Iraq, they had been affected by the feeling, eagerly exploited by the Conservatives, that Blair was not to be trusted. Labour lost heavily but not disastrously, seeing a majority of 160 cut to 67. The party that clearly benefited from the Iraq factor was the Liberal Democrats, now firmly established as the third party in British politics. They are the descendents of the great Liberal Party of Gladstone and Asquith. During the twentieth century, the party split and its electoral support steadily eroded, so that fifty years ago it had only six MPs; now it has sixty-six. Unlike the other two parties, Liberal Democrats were opposed to the Iraq war and have had their reward, winning seats from Labour, particularly in places with academic communities where opposition to the war was strong, such as Cambridge.

Blair's reduced majority is perfectly respectable; indeed, a sixty-seven voting majority would have seemed wonderful to Labour in its long years in opposition. But many of the obedient Blairites have been culled, and Blair may have problems dealing with the new reduced parliamentary party, many of whom owe him no favors. He will have to drop his high-handed presidential style--dictatorial, some say--and start negotiating and wheeling and dealing and accommodating himself to other people's wishes, which he may not find easy. American presidents, of course, have always had to do this, but a British prime minister with a large majority in the Commons and a disciplined party has almost dictatorial powers. Blair is committed to stepping down before the end of the new parliament, and his successor is certain to be Gordon Brown, the long-serving and very successful chancellor of the Exchequer, and old political rival to Blair. He is more popular in the party, where he is regarded, on rather little evidence, as the heir of Labour traditions that Blair spurns, and is popular, too, in the country. He has long had his sights on the leadership, which could now be within his grasp, though Blair is, I suspect, too attached to power to give it up soon.

The turnout was shamefully low, just over 60 percent, though slightly higher than in the 2001 election. Many voters have turned their backs on politics, but those who did vote cheeringly refused to conform to predictable patterns and there were many unexpected results, with independent candidates being elected--a real rarity in modern British politics. One commentator remarked that before the election the experts told the voters that the electoral system would not permit them to administer a measured rebuke to the prime minister, but this is just what they seem to have done.

Bernard Bergonzi is a long-time contributor. His most recent book is A Victorian Wanderer (Oxford University Press).