Winning in spite of themselves.

LONDON

"Love Tangle Millionaire Shot Dead," cried the newspaper placards in London on the afternoon of Election Day, signaling the return to normal after a tedious month of nothing but party politics. This was followed, a few hours later, by even more sensational grounds for relief. It might have seemed incredible that Britain would go against the whole tendency of the Western world and vote for socialism, higher taxes, and less free enterprise, but the polls were suggesting that just such folly was about to occur.

Several highly paid authors and actors had written articles explaining why they were keen to pay more tax to soothe their social consciences, nobody apparently having told them that they could pay as much as they liked immediately without involving others whose consciences might be less pink. More surprisingly, the Financial Times came out in favor of Labour, for no clear reason except that it was time for a change. Only as results replaced forecasts on the television screen did the scale of the pollsters' error become clear. The Conservatives lost a lot of the parliamentary seats they had won in the Thatcher landslide of 1987, but they finished with a majority that should keep John Major at Downing Street for at least three or four years.

In the exuberance of their relief, many Conservatives promptly dismissed the shadows that had previously alarmed them. The campaign, they now said, had been skillful, and John Major had emerged as a brilliant leader. The literal soapbox from which he had addressed the crowd in one or two rallies was hailed as a masterly symbol of the great man's common touch. All of which is nonsense.

As one of the more sensible pundits observed, "The Tories at the moment sound-because they are-intellectually incoherent. They are simultaneously in favor of high levels of public spending and the rigorous control of public spending, of low interest rates and a huge Public-sector Borrowing Requirement, of individual self-reliance and an extended welfare state."

Labour, meanwhile, having abandoned its Marxist principles, offered no justification for a concept of "fairness" which involves not only taking money from one section of the community and giving it to another, but taking the power of decision away from citizens and giving it to civil servants. No evidence was presented for Labour's continued belief that governments are better at running the country's business than businessmen.

The Liberal Democrats wobbled about in the middle as usual, declaring as usual that this election would be their great breakthrough, and in the event losing much of their vote to the more red-blooded Labour Party.

No party dealt seriously with the real economic crisis brought about by excessive government spending and by the high interest rates that resulted from locking the pound into the European Exchange Rate Mechanism; or with the problem in general of Britain's relationship to an increasingly federalist, protectionist Europe; or with defense in an obviously unstable world. Awkward members of each party, who might have raised such disruptive questions, were ruthlessly kept away from the press.

As for Mr. Major, he continues to be an appalling public performer. His famous niceness," however, was admittedly worth a lot of votes. By contrast, Neil Kinnock, the Labour Party leader, appeared unattractively glib. "He would boil his own granny down for glue to win votes," a Scottish Nationalist said.

Major's dullness made him seem the safer option. He was in favor of low taxes and (he said) nil inflation, whereas the Labour Party openly wanted higher taxes and (according to its chief financial spokesman) would be quite happy with "reasonable" inflation. Both parties offered more public spending, but Labour's promises were vast, including four new government ministries, 33 new governmental organizations, and 80 separate pledges of extra money, to be paid for by "growth" or taxing "the rich."

The business community overwhelmingly-as much as 87 per cent was claimed-backed the Conservatives. The Labour Party had the support of all those groups which, in one way or another, live on taxpayers' cash. The public-sector trade unions ran expensive and thoroughly dishonest anti-Tory campaigns, asserting that the Conservatives would privatize the Health Service and starve the schools of money.

As the mist in the crystal ball clears away, the reasons for what happened emerge quite simply. The Labour Party committed suicide with its alternative budget," in which-bravely, people said at the time-it spelled out the tax proposals that would be immediately implemented if Labour won. These amounted to a big increase in tax for anyone earning even slightly above the average income, and a decrease in tax or an increase in benefits for the rest that came, in many cases, to no more than twopence a week. The arithmetic of redistribution inevitably produces this kind of disproportionate loss and gain; its chief appeal is to envy rather than philanthropy, and the British people are not in a mood for class war. Class war against Mr. Major would, anyway, be absurd.

The right-wing and middle-of-the-road press brought these points out strongly, hammering them through with unprecedented zeal, not perhaps not unconnected with the fact that Labour was proposing to add around 19 per cent to the marginal tax rate of every senior journalist in Britain.

Here, the newspapers, and especially the despised tabloids, fought precisely the campaign the Conservative Party should have been waging. Day after day they did the arithmetic, pursued the implications, and blazoned the effect of the Labour policies. On the morning before the election, the Daily Mail's front page was blackedged and headed with the single word: WARNING. And it worked. Enough floating voters, including many from the chattering classes who may previously have believed they were going to vote Labour or Liberal Democratic, found themselves looking into the abyss of what a Kinnock government would really mean.

It does not follow that the Labour Party, or even that socialist ideology, has become permanently unelectable. According to the Evening Standard's calculations, half the working population of Britain is employed by the state, and many of the other half are dependent on subsidies and welfare payments; which renders them a natural constituency for Labour. Even under Mrs. Thatcher this constituency was never diminished, and Mr. Major's approach seems unlikely to make inroads into the dependency culture. Sir Leo Pliatzky, a former senior civil servant at the Treasury, once compared politicians thirsting to spend public money to elephants at a waterhole: You drive them off, and drive them off, and every day they are back again." John Major has already invented a new Cabinet Minister for Fun, with responsibility for sport, the arts, and a national lottery.

The object of this rather unconservative innovation was partly to flatter the insatiable subsidy-seekers of the arts lobby and partly to show that Mr. Major himself has enthusiasims beyond those of a national bank manager. The line-up of his administration in general is sensible and not very interesting. The two women in the cabinet are there chiefly because they are women. A couple of Thatcherites are in positions sufficiently important to reassure the right wing of the party that all is not lost, and there are several "wets" to assure the left wing that something has been gained. Of Mr. Major's rivals for the leadership, one, Douglas Hurd, a steady man, remains at the Foreign Office: the other, the flamboyant Michael Heseltine, will be an interventionist Secretary of State for Industry.

The task for the Conservatives is as much philosophical as practical. They must tackle the consequences of their own recent profligacy; but they should also face the evident truth that conservatism, although it bore fruit under Mrs. Thatcher, still has only a very shallow grip in the electoral earth. After a salutary fright the Conservatives won this election because Labour, egged on by the polls, threw it away. If they are to win another, they must sell ideas ahead of policies. But philosophers among Mr. Major's associates are thin on the ground.