Britons’ Honeymoon With Blair Clouds Up

Politics mingled with holiday cheer at a London literary agent’s party for her writers. Said the essayist to the novelist: “All my friends and I find we are going off Labor.”

The novelist replied: “The old saying is that, with Labor, ‘it always ends in tears.’ I’m afraid it might be true again.”

Suddenly, meteoric Tony Blair, Europe’s favorite politician and Bill Clinton’s best British buddy, is losing some of the bedrock supporters and crossover voters who helped him overturn an 18-year Conservative dynasty of Margaret Thatcher and her heirs.

A quick-succession series of controversies has cast a cloud over the prime minister for the first time since he stormed to office last spring. With disillusion in the air, the honeymoon is ending for “Call me Tony” Blair.

Tight-money policies, hard-edged social reforms and decisions reaching deep into British life have provoked a backlash from his own party and public dismay from protesters as diverse as farmers, butchers, students, consumers, welfare recipients and genteel country people.

“Radical decisions, particularly in the reform of the welfare state, are bound to upset people,” said Vernon Bogdanor, a professor of government at Oxford University. “Blair is forcing his party and the British public to face reality. A lot of people don’t want to do that.”

Nonetheless, the prime minister’s popularity, though bruised, is still manifest. In fact, one of the reasons that Blair’s contretemps loom so large is that he has climbed so high.

The 44-year-old Blair is the paramount symbol of a new-look country brimming with self-confidence. When French President Jacques Chirac came to town, for example, Blair eschewed traditional wood-paneled London to offer lunch atop a skyscraper in the city’s newly gentrified East End.

Wooing Britain’s business establishment, historically at odds with a worker-based party, Blair has built on inherited Conservative free-market economic strengths.

He stripped the government of its authority to set interest rates and gave that right to a newly independent Bank of England. And while there are signs of a coming downturn, Britain has Europe’s healthiest economy: Unemployment, at 5.2%, is about half what it was five years ago.

Under Blair, Britain has returned Hong Kong, the last jewel of the empire, to China with nary a protest back home. Blair has brokered peace talks in Northern Ireland, and he won polls for the devolution of home rule to Scotland and Wales. More constitutional change is in store: a freedom of information bill, election reform, a mayor for London and overhaul of the House of Lords.

Blair’s Britain has banned all handguns and solidified its image as “Cool Britannia” in the arts, movies and pop music. The Spice Girls pop group is an international icon; “The Full Monty” has earned more than any British film before it. Even the unofficial national religion, soccer, is world class again.

But Blair’s run is being broken by opposition to his reforms and by criticism of highhanded government behavior.

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It all began with Humphrey. In November, the prime minister’s office was forced to go to extraordinary lengths to prove that the black-and-white cat that had lived at 10 Downing St. for years was alive and well after it was banished without public notice to less august precincts. Blair’s lawyer wife, Cherie, is known to have cat allergies.

The Humphrey saga was followed by a political car wreck. During the spring election campaign, Labor successfully attacked Conservative “sleaze.” But last month, the head of Formula One auto racing was discovered to have contributed $1.6 million to Blair’s campaign. That became public after the government, at odds with its European allies, decided to exempt race cars--laden with cigarette ads--from a ban on tobacco advertising.

No wrongdoing is alleged, but the incident proved the first blush of embarrassment for a prime minister who had not made a misstep.

In another row, Blair opponents and some newspapers are calling for the head of millionaire Geoffrey Robinson. Blair had named him paymaster general--the No. 4-ranking member of the Finance Ministry--and Robinson is now accused of a lack of candor about his personal finances.

Robinson, who benefits from a low-tax offshore trust fund, came under fire after announcing new restrictions on IRA-like savings funds favored by the British middle class.

Again, there is no accusation of wrongdoing, but Robinson has lost credibility, according to Conservative Party financial spokesman Peter Lilly.

“If he [Robinson] will not now resign, the prime minister must dismiss him,” Lilly said.

Nothing doing, Blair responded.

This “New Labor” prime minister won office by eschewing the classic socialist principles of a combative and spendthrift party. Now he is discovering that his vote-winning theory is perilous policy in the view of old-line Laborites brought up to believe that government must vigorously redress social imbalances on behalf of the disadvantaged.

Case in point: Blair’s government has infuriated British students by announcing that it will abolish a keystone of the welfare state, free university tuition. As a result, university applications have slumped. Students march, but the government is unbowed.

“Reform of the 50-year-old welfare state will continue. The government will stick to its strategy of getting the unemployed off benefits and back to work,” Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown said after another controversial Blair initiative was announced earlier this month.

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This time, Labor’s left wing rebelled against the initiative, a cut in benefits for single parents devised as a means of getting them back to work. In a major breach of party discipline, many Labor members of Parliament deserted Blair to vote against the measure. A junior minister and four unpaid ministerial assistants quit.

“This is about demonstrating to the poor that we can be as brutal to the poor as the government we replaced,” Labor member of Parliament Ken Livingstone said. “They [the poor] feel betrayed by this government, and I feel ashamed of what we are doing.”

Blair defended his plan, saying: “Instead of paying out more benefits, I want to reduce unemployment and reduce the cost of failure.”

Despite bad blood, the $100-million cuts were passed. In their wake, Blair’s ministers will not quite deny persistent reports that a cut in benefits to the disabled is also being studied. Reform of the National Health Service, through which 87% of Britons receive free health care, is next.

“I don’t want just to save the NHS, I want to give it a new lease on life,” Blair said of a system that now has 1.2 million patients on the waiting list for non-urgent treatments.

Beyond the reforms, Blair’s judgment is also being called into question for the first time.

Critics say that banning the sale of all beef on the bone this month was an immoderate response to the remote possibility--1 in 600 million by one estimate--that it could cause the fatal human equivalent of “mad cow” disease. The new beef crisis and an imminent ban on fox hunting have cost Blair support in the countryside.

The criticism does not rest lightly on a young, headstrong government accustomed to having its own way.

David Hill, Labor’s chief media spokesman, recently criticized one of Britain’s most respected BBC broadcasters for repeatedly interrupting Social Security Secretary Harriet Harman in a radio interview during the welfare cuts storm.

Hill threatened to “suspend cooperation” with broadcaster John Humphrys’ “Today” program, an early morning must-listen news show for Britain’s political class.

“It took the Tories [Conservatives] seven years in government to declare war on the BBC. The Labor Party has done it in seven months. . . . The party’s move is wrong on every possible count,” the left-wing Guardian newspaper said in an editorial lamenting the Blair government’s “arrogance of power.”