Labor Party Savors Success Over Tories in District Vote

David Hill, who speaks for the juggernaut Labor Party, basked Friday at the happy junction where partisan analysis merges with conventional wisdom in a country marching toward potentially lopsided national elections.

“Every night [Prime Minister] John Major must pray that we make a big mistake,” Hill said at a morning-after encounter. “As things stand now, it’s his only salvation.”

In the wee hours Friday, the electoral district of Wirral South near Liverpool obligingly confirmed what everybody seems to know about British politics: Labor’s hot, Major’s Conservatives are not. An era is ending, and big changes are coming.

In a by-election for a vacant parliamentary seat, voters in the traditionally Conservative district switched in a big way from the Tories to Tony Blair’s new-look Labor Party. A seat won by Conservatives with a margin of 8,183 votes five years ago fell to Labor this time by 7,888 votes. The percentages were 53 to 34, mirroring Labor’s lead in the polls.

The 19% vote swing would signal an electoral revolution if it finds national echo in a Major-Blair showdown this spring: Almost one-third of current Conservative lawmakers were elected with a smaller margin than their late colleague in South Wirral.

“Tonight the general election really began,” victorious Labor candidate Ben Chapman said. “People are telling John Major, ‘Enough is enough.’ The Tories have been in power too long and have lost our trust.”

A jubilant Blair observed: “The results show that people believe the Conservatives are no longer capable of forming a government.”

In redesigning a party palatable to middle-of-the-road voters, Blair, 43, has dragged Labor away from its radical socialist and trade-union roots.

Chapman’s victory breakfast Friday was symbolic of change in a party whose members not long ago unabashedly celebrated British virtues such as a cup of tea or a pint of bitter. Chapman breakfasted on croissants and strawberries.

Analysts see both immediate and long-term implications from Thursday’s results in the middle-class Wirral district.

For one thing, it created a minority government for the first time in 18 years of Conservative rule, with 322 votes in the House of Commons against 323 for all other parties combined.

Although the balance of power nominally lies with Conservative foes, it cannot be harnessed, because nine Ulster Unionists from Northern Ireland--key swing votes--say they will not align with Labor to force Major out of office before his term expires in May.

“We are not happy about it, but we are resigned to a May 1 election,” Hill said, “and we will not force a vote of confidence before then.”

Major has from the outset played the long game, analysts note, hoping that a strong and steadily strengthening economy, aided perhaps by some disastrous misstep by Labor, would in time decisively improve his chances.

The Conservatives, whom Blair blames for 22 tax increases since Margaret Thatcher brought the Tories to power in 1979, are seen by disgruntled and bored voters as stale and vacillating, pollsters say.

But Major, for one, is not throwing in the towel.

“We can and will win a fifth term. It will be a tough decision for voters, but I believe it will end in our favor,” he said in Wirral’s ruins Friday.

Labor strategists and political analysts now believe that Major will announce a May 1 election around the end of this month. That would allow a formal campaign of about five weeks, although all parties are already campaigning.