THE WORLD : Major Misses the Point--Power Struggle Is About Thatcher : While Tories prepare for the Tuesday vote for a party leader, it is the ‘Iron Lady’ who still pulls the strings.

British Prime Minister John Major is finished. He just doesn’t know it yet, because he is convinced that he is going through a classic British power struggle for command of the Tory Party. Instead, he is the victim of the Americanization of British politics.

The way for Americans to understand this is to transpose the characters. Margaret Thatcher is Ronald Reagan. Major is George Bush, the weak heir who could never command the devotion of those who gave their hearts to Reagan.

Now consider Major’s challengers in Britain’s coming leadership struggle. Michael Heseltine is Sen. Bob Dole, an old party hand and political veteran now trying to sound more right-wing than his record would suggest.

The fiery young Thatcherite and employment secretary, Michael Portillo, is Newt Gingrich. The secretary for Wales, a lugubrious young Thatcherite who was baptized John Redwood (but called “Vulcan” after the “Star Trek” planet of the emotionless Mr. Spock) is Patrick J. Buchanan.

Assume Reagan is in full health and determined, not just to be a player, but to decide the next generation of party leaders. Assume also that this Reagan is filled with bile and vengeance for the Bush-like wimp who betrayed the great heritage.

Such a Reagan has only one choice to make: to decide which of the two devoted heirs can best fulfill the Reagan legacy.

The Americanization of British politics is not just a matter of personalities. Nor is it confined to the Tory Party. The Labor Party is basing itself on Bill Clinton’s 1992 win--when he claimed to be a New Democrat who was tough on crime, determined to reform the welfare system, and get the economy moving again.

The new Labor leader, fresh-faced Tony Blair, is a Clinton clone--but without a breath of scandal attached to his name. A church-going lawyer, married to another lawyer, his slogan is “Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime.”

Blair is so attached to the Clinton model and the centrist political agenda of the Democratic Leadership Conference, that he recently hired as his new chief of staff, Jonathan Powell, who spent the last three years as the British Embassy’s political expert on the Clinton Administration.

Powell lived with the Clinton campaign in 1992, communicated constantly with them in government and now keeps up the special relationship from Blair’s office in the House of Commons.

But if Labor were enthused by the Clinton victory in 1992, the Thatcherite Tories were ecstatic about the GOP congressional sweep last November. Gingrich is their new hero, and they have enthusiastically taken up his agenda of slashing government and cutting spending, and even plan their own Contract with Britain for the next general election.

The Tories are trying to go through the same revolution of ideology and generations that the GOP has managed with its new majority in Congress. The difference is that Reagan, the Republicans’ hero of the 1980s, is out of the fight. In Britain, Thatcher is at the very heart of it.

This may be Major’s battle to survive, but it is Thatcher’s war, taking place on her chosen ground of Europe, and launched to her timing as an act of revenge against the man she promoted as her chosen successor in 1990.

Thatcher never expected to lose the party leadership. She had won three elections and a war, and was the dominant political figure of her time in Europe. The leadership of the party is not a matter for the public, nor for the party rank and file in the regions. There are no primaries in Britain. The Conservative leader is elected by the members of Parliament in the House of Commons, and by 1990, the bulk of them were her men, who owed their seats to her election victories.

So, when it became clear that she had lost their confidence as the recession bit in 1990, she threw her weight behind Major. She had promoted him extraordinarily fast, to be foreign secretary and then chancellor of the Exchequer. Her legacy seemed safe in his hands.

Above all, Major would stop her mortal foe, Michael Heseltine, the only other charismatic figure who could in any way rival her grip on Tory Party affections. A pro-European, Heseltine is almost Clintonesque in his belief that government can be a force for good, that it should intervene in the economy and has a moral duty to improve the lives of the poor.

For Thatcher, Major’s biggest failure, beyond his compromises over Europe, and the plunge of the opinion polls that have the Tories 30 points behind Labor, lay in the risk that his weakness could enable Heseltine to take over the party.

This battle with Heseltine filled Thatcher’s final years as prime minister. He had left her Cabinet over an argument whether to turn to the European partners or the Americans to save the British helicopter industry. Beyond the inevitable clash of personalities lay two deep issues of principle--over Europe and over the role of government intervention in industrial strategy.

Thatcher and Heseltine represent two different wings of British Toryism--and two different social classes. Heseltine, of the Brigade of Guards and a grand country estate, believes in the upper-class tradition of British conservatism. He cleaves to that old concept of feudal loyalties that rules Britain’s fashionable cavalry regiments: Officers must take care of the horses before they take care of the men, and take care of their men before they look after themselves.

In modern political shorthand, Heseltine’s is the Toryism of One Nation, a national community where the poor are not abandoned and the rich remember their civic duties.

Thatcher set out to destroy this tradition, cleaning out the upper-classes from her Cabinet, bringing in the self-made men and the new rich, sharing in that ruthless ambition that took her from the lower middle classes and her father’s corner shop to the top of British politics.

There was no One Nation for her, nor for that generation of younger Conservatives who entered Parliament in her three successive election victories. Portillo, 42, and Redwood, 44, are two prime examples, following in her meritocratic footsteps from state schools to Oxford.

Right-wing rebels in Major’s Cabinet, Redwood and Portillo had given constant aid and comfort to the band of anti-European Tory MPs, who kept up their guerrilla campaign against Major and his constant compromises over Europe.

That compromise, between Heseltine’s support for an integrated Europe and a single European currency, and the Thatcherite opposition to any further loss of British sovereignty, can no longer be sustained. Major can no longer carry out his political function as the man to paper over the yawning chasm in his party. The struggle is out in the open.

It was forced on him by Thatcher, when she used the launching of her new memoirs to denounce Major’s record on Europe, on taxes and with America.

With that attack, Thatcher unleashed her supporters and forced Major to turn and stand at bay, demanding a new party leadership election where his critics must “put up or shut up.”

The July 4 ballot will decide whether Major gets a majority strong enough to allow him to stumble on to what looks like inevitable defeat at Labor’s hands in the next general election, or whether the abstentions and votes for Redwood will be sufficient to force a second ballot, for the real trial of strength between Heseltine and the Thatcher heirs.

The intrigue behind this almost feudal conspiracy to depose the party leader has inspired British commentators to see this as another familiar chapter from the cavalcade of English history. There are comparisons with the 12th-Century civil war between the Empress Maud and King Steven, or with the 15th-Century Wars of the Roses, when Yorkists and Lancastrians vied for the throne.

The late-night TV comedy shows sing an old music hall song to dramatize Thatcher’s grip on her party: “With her head tucked underneath her arm, she walks the Bloody Tower.” Indeed, her ghostly influence still stalks the battlements of the party that ditched her and the government that let her down.

The echoes linger--not least in the extraordinary way that the British people have no say in this palace intrigue over their next prime minister. Only the 320 Tory members of Parliament have the right to vote in the July 4 ballot.

The irony of a vote on U.S. Independence Day will be rich. It will determine whether the spirit of Gingrich takes over the Mother of Parliaments, or the Tory tradition of One Nation will endure.

There is little place in that struggle for the endless compromises of decent, dithering Major, bravely though he is battling to save the throne. Even if he stumbles on to another general election where the British voters will finally have their say, the Americanization of British politics will get him in the end, crushed between the Clinton clones of Labor and the Newtoids of Thatcher’s heirs*