Taxation; no representation.

|The results," admitted Sir Norman Fowler, the Conservative Party chairman, "were poor." He was talking about the special election at Newbury and the county elections which were held simultaneously across England and Wales. Noah might equally have said that there was a nasty drizzle.

At Newbury the voters were to choose a replacement for a member of Parliament who died in February. In the last general election, a year ago, the Conservatives won that district by a margin of 12,000; in the by-election this month the Liberal Democrat won by 22,000: a 28.4 per cent swing against the government - much worse than even the gloomiest prophets had foreseen. Meanwhile, out of 47 counties in England and Wales, only one, Buckinghamshire, now remains under Conservative control.

The prime minister, John Major, conceded that the Conservative government had been "given a bloody nose," and promised that lessons would be learned. However, it is by no means clear that Mr. Major and his colleagues are capable of learning the appropriate lessons; the shock of seeing themselves as others see them might be psychologically intolerable.

They believe the principal cause of this electoral catastrophe is that voters were still gazing gloomily back on the years of economic recession instead of forward to the recovery which now beckons. In other words, "It's the economy, stupid." Of course the state of Britain's economy and the government's handling of it loomed large: but people do, more or less, accept that Britain's problems have been part of a worldwide recession. They also accept what almost every independent economist has told them: that Britain's problems were made much worse by the government's decision to lock the value of the pound into the European Exchange Rate Mechanism. What they cannot stomach is the manner in which the government has responded to the collapse of that policy. For painful months and years Mr. Major and the chancellor of the exchequer, Norman Lamont, insisted that Britain must, whatever the immediate price, stay within the ERM. Last September Britain was forced out. The very next day, Mr. Lamont said that he was "singing in his bath" at being liberated. During the campaign at Newbury he sang, or at least quoted (ominously in the French tongue), Edith Piaf's famous number "Je ne regrette rien." And his colleagues have been boasting, positively boasting, that it was the government's firm policies which have brought the first, barely discernible, green shoots of economic recovery.

Very few people are equipped to judge the technical merits of the ERM: but most people recognize a shameless turnaround when they see it.

Nor have the voters, of whatever political persuasion, liked the way in which, while they shivered in the comfortless winds of recession, the government seemed exclusively, obsessively, concerned with ratifying the Maastricht Treaty, another step toward an unatural federal Europe. Again, very few people, including members of Parliament, really know what the Maastricht Treaty contains: but they know shameless behavior when they see it, and they see it in the maneuvers, the arm-twisting, the tergiversations, by which the government has been pushing this wretched treaty through Parliament.

Every opinion poll has shown that a huge majority of the British people thinks there should be a referendum on the subject. That's not the British way, says the government (supported by the Labor opposition); we trust such decisions to our elected parliamentary representatives. But, whenever a vote in Parliament has threatened the passage of the bill, the government has found some procedural device to avoid the consequences.

These things have not gone unnoticed: but the government has ignored mounting public rage. Mr. Major and his colleagues apparently believe that all they have to contend with is the obduracy of the Euroskeptics; so that, once the bill has been passed, bitterness will subside and rifts heal.

Pigs may also fly - except that British pigs would probably need a Eurolicense from Brussels. I have never known Conservatives, let alone the relatively non-political voters who supported the Conservative Party at the last general election, as disillusioned, as angry, as they are today. They were not voting, at Newbury and in the local elections, to put the Liberal Democrats into power (and certainly not the Labour Party, which did rather badly). They were voting, or abstaining, as a gesture, to show what they think of the government for which they themselves voted just a year before. The government's overall approval rating stood at 16 per cent in the latest opinion poll.

A dozen minor causes of discontent have reinforced the main ones: shabby personal behavior by certain ministers, ill-judged announcements which then had to be (or should have been) reversed, a stream of petty regulations which irritate, and some thoroughly unconservative legislation. Much-needed proposals to tighten the academic standard in schools have been, in practice, bungled. And, crucially, there is the whole question of taxing and spending.

Last year the government, like President Bush, told the voters to read its lips - "No more taxes": this year's budget not only broke that pledge with Clintonesque abandon but wiped out, in an afternoon, a decade of tax-cutting. It effectively raised the standard rate of income tax, went back to the bad old concept of a supplementary tax on "unearned" (that is, investment) income, and, as though the chancellor were willfully planting land-mines in the government's future path, imposed an increasing Value Added Tax on domestic lighting and heating.

Prime Minister Major has resisted, so far, the widespread opinion, clamorously and continuously urged in the press ever since the ERM debacle of last September, that the chancellor of the exchequer is a busted flush and ought to go. Mr. Lamont, he says, has been carrying out the agreed policies of the government; to which he, the prime minister, in particular assented. He may well be right in thinking it unfair to make Norman Lamont a scapegoat. But then a scapegoat is not supposed to have committed personally all the sins which are heaped upon him.

After, perhaps, some further tactical delay, there really will have to be a new chancellor. Which prompts the awkward - and largely, but no longer entirely, unspoken - question: And a new prime minister? The only thing that may prevent a challenge to Mr. Major's leadership this year is the lack of any obvious alternative.

The crisis has come so early in the government's life, with a full three or four years to run, that there is time to recover - unless, which is quite possible, further special-election defeats (and another contest is pending) erode its majority in the House of Commons, already down to 19. The odds, for psephological reasons, may still favor the Conservatives to win the next general election: but they would be very foolish to rely on that kind of reassurance. However, the opposition parties cannot take full advantage of the government's unpopularity, because they are themselves in favor both of Maastricht and of more public spending. The majority of people are miserably, or angrily, aware that none of the parties represents their views and feelings on these central issues.

Future historians, taking a longer view, will need to address this profound puzzle. How was it that so broad a gulf developed between the whole British political class and the British people?