Who's Tony Blair? Maggie Thatcher in reverse.

There is a general assumption in Britain that by next spring Tony Blair, leader of the Labour party, will be prime minister. May 1997 is the latest possible date at which the general election can be held. The Conservatives, tired, accident-prone, and divided after seventeen years in office, have been trailing far behind Labour in the opinion polls and losing heavily in local elections. If Labour gets in, the result will be greeted with a combination of relief, curiosity, and unease, and the greatest curiosity will be about Tony Blair.

Blair is an impressive but mysterious figure, whose career and character are oddly reminiscent of those of Margaret Thatcher. When she became leader in opposition in 1975, she had held only minor cabinet office and had no solid, identifiable body of support in the Conservative party. Electing a woman leader was extraordinarily risky, but Thatcher boldly seized the opportunity. She had a strong sense of what she wanted to do, which was nothing less than to transform the party and give it a new direction, and to this end she brought immense courage and that indispensable element of political success, luck. The luck has been conspicuous in Blair's career. He, too, has got to the top from nowhere in particular. Like many prominent people in the Labour party, past and present, Blair is of Scottish origin. But he speaks with a standard English accent, and was educated at a posh Edinburgh "public" (that is, private) school and at Oxford.

He is a slim, good-looking man, surprisingly youthful at forty-three; when he was first famous, his fawn-like countenance gained him the nickname "Bambi," but this was dropped when it became evident what a tough political animal Blair is. He is a lawyer by profession, and is a sharp debater though not a powerful orator. He has what all politicians need today, a neat way with sound-bites. Blair has been in Parliament since 1983, sitting for an industrial constituency in the North East of England with a solid Labour majority. How he got his seat in Parliament was the first example of his luck; the local party needed a new candidate and had all but decided on a former MP of marked left-wing views. But Blair persuaded them to see him at the eleventh hour and made such a good impression that they adopted him. His next piece of luck was of the grimmer kind that comes from stepping into a dead man's shoes.

After Labour lost the 1992 election, which they had seemed to have a good chance of winning, the leader, Neil Kinnock, a decent but limited Welshman, stepped down. The new leader was John Smith, a popular, avuncular Scot who had held office in the Labour government of the 1970s; he was another decent man, though a product of the machine politics of the Scottish Labour party. Smith was a cautious reformer, but his main aim was to keep the party united. In 1994 he died suddenly of a heart attack. Blair, who was in the Shadow Cabinet as spokesman on home affairs, seized his chance. He fought a brilliantly successful campaign and was elected leader by a convincing majority.

Nevertheless, Blair was mistrusted by many on the traditional left, especially when, as leader, he made it clear how much he wanted to change and modernize the party. The Labour party has always been a very broad church, ranging from members who would be at home in Clinton's Democratic party to covert (and occasionally overt) Marxists. The close connection with the trade unions was part of its founding tradition, but increasingly unpopular with the voters. Smith had made moves to loosen it and Blair continued them. But his main accomplishment was to persuade the party to remove a clause in its constitution, dating back to 1918, which stated its aim as the public ownership of the means of production, distribution, and exchange. The Left was very committed to this aspiration, as representing the Socialist ideal, but the mainstream of the party found it something of an embarrassment and treated it as obsolete and irrelevant. Nevertheless, as long as the clause was there the opponents of Labour could allege that its ultimate aim was to nationalize everything in sight. Smith had been against disrupting the party by changing the constitution, but Blair, with characteristic courage, insisted and won the issue on a ballot of the membership. There were practical, electoral motives for the change, but his basic motive seems to have been the moral conviction that one shouldn't say things one doesn't believe to be true.

Blair is still ready to talk about "socialism" but treats it as a potent myth or metaphor, rather like a radical theologian describing God. He is happy to accept competition and the market economy, but in the context of a more humane and responsible society. He is much more a left-wing Christian Democrat on the European model than a Socialist or even a Social Democrat. He believes in marriage and the family, wants to help the poor to help themselves, and thinks that rights are accompanied by responsibilities; these stances antagonize some on the left as much as his revisionist ideas about the economy. Blair could be described as a communitarian, to invoke that fashionable, loose term; he has written, "I joined the Labour party out of a conviction that individuals prosper in an inclusive and active civil society." He is a practicing Anglican who is said to play the guitar at services in his local church, and his wife is a Catholic. She is a high-powered, highly paid lawyer; she is not politically active, but one is inevitably reminded of that other famous pair of lawyers, the Clintons. Tony Blair, though, has no hint of scandal in his past life; if there were any, the indefatigably malicious British press would certainly have unearthed it by now. He will face a bitter and probably dirty struggle during the coming months; the Conservative party, however unpopular at the moment, remains an efficient machine dedicated to holding on to power, and most of the national newspapers are pro-Conservative; they are currently annoyed with the government, but they are likely to rally round as the election approaches.

Blair looks like the probable winner but nothing is certain in politics, and the electorate may still atavistically vote Conservative yet again, whatever their present discontents. If elected, Blair will have to fight on two fronts, against the Conservatives in opposition and again the Left in his own party. But he is a remarkable politician, still young, and, like Margaret Thatcher, he could dominate the parliamentary scene for a long time to come.