Blair Ahead in Campaign Despite Himself

With less than a week to go in the election that he says will be his last hurrah as prime minister, Tony Blair is looking rather wan. His eyes are ringed from too little sleep, his middle is starting to bulge, and the lines on his forehead have deepened.

The earnest words continue to tumble nimbly from his lips, but increasingly for his audiences, the magic seems gone. People say they will vote for him and his Labor Party over his hapless opponents, but many also say they no longer believe his explanations, justifications and promises after the experience of the last eight years.

“There is no alternative (alas),” reads the cover of the election-week edition of the Economist magazine, over a picture of a smiling, somewhat vacant-looking Blair.

For a candidate who is on course to be reelected to a third straight term Thursday and who, at 51, is arguably the most successful Labor politician ever, Blair is emerging from a grueling campaign as something of a loser.

In interviews, he has acknowledged that his popularity is down. As a result, he is campaigning more alongside Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown, who is seen as Blair’s heir apparent at the helm of the party.

With a large majority in Parliament, Blair has been able to almost double spending on education and the National Health Service, hire more police and forge a peace deal for Northern Ireland. With finance minister Brown, he is presiding over an economy that is humming along nicely. And, although the war in Iraq was unpopular, Blair has steered Britain through what appears to be the worst of it, with two British deaths there in the last two months.

Nevertheless, the criticism that Blair is too slippery and too glib has stuck. An almost palpable sense of betrayal often brings not only anger but also hurt during the Blair campaign’s frequent town hall meetings with the electorate, which have been dubbed masochism sessions.

Late last week, at one of his ritual grillings -- this time at the BBC television program “Question Time” -- the audience booed when he appeared and then became even more hostile.

“That is a lie! You lied to this country, and that is why we can’t support you!” shouted one young man, accusing Blair of exaggerating the intelligence about Saddam Hussein’s threat to the world.

“What new stealth taxes do you intend to introduce first?” asked another.

“Mr. Blair, I think you’re very lucky that we have a weak opposition at the moment,” said a third, in possibly the kindest remark of the half-hour session.

“Right, I take [it] that’s not a compliment,” a perspiring Blair answered meekly.

In his pour-your-heart-out style, Blair readily admits that the wear and tear on him has been “relentless.” His frustration crept in during a heated news conference in the London headquarters of the Bloomberg financial news service, as he grappled for what must have been the thousandth time with whether he’d shaved the truth about Iraq.

“Whatever I say, I will never, ever convince some people who have been opposed to this war,” Blair said. “People can continue to frame this in terms of my integrity, but it was about a decision. I took it. I have to live with the consequences of it. I don’t regret it. I cannot apologize. I tried very hard to find a middle way through, but I could not get it.”

During the last week of the campaign, his chief opponents, Conservative leader Michael Howard and Liberal Democrat leader Charles Kennedy, have tried to bring the discussion back to the war, while Blair would like to talk about the economy and his agenda. It includes mounting an international effort against global warming and raising foreign assistance to Africa, while continuing improvements in healthcare and education in Britain.

After hundreds of hours of television coverage and forests of newspaper articles, the campaign for Britain’s next government remains pretty much where it began April 11: with Labor in front, despite the widespread disenchantment with Blair. It recalls the Shakespeare quotation about life as “a tale told by an idiot -- full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

Most polls put Labor 4 to 8 percentage points ahead of the Conservatives, with the left-of-center Liberal Democrats a distant third. A new survey by the Times of London newspaper put Labor’s lead even higher -- 13 percentage points ahead of the Conservatives based on polling conducted April 27-30.

Although it is possible that voters’ sentiments will finally start to shift, most analysts are asking not whether Labor will win, but by how much. (Any significant shift away from Labor would probably hasten the mood among dissidents to replace Blair with Brown.)

It has been a frustrating time for Howard. His charges that the Labor government has been soft on crime, lax on immigration and negligent on hospital sanitation have not caught on. And his party’s original campaign slogan, “Are you thinking what we’re thinking?” has become a joke.

“Are you sinking like I’m sinking?” the satirical Private Eye magazine showed Howard asking.

“Are you remembering what we’re remembering?” Blair asked, alluding to the Conservatives’ 18-year reign under Margaret Thatcher and John Major that saw cuts in public services, high interest rates, high unemployment and high inflation.

With the days dwindling, Howard has turned to swatting at Blair’s integrity. “I think I am entitled to say character and trust are issues and the prime minister has not told us the truth,” he said last week.

But this tactic didn’t appear to be working, either. Although a poll in the Daily Telegraph on Friday said that 58% of respondents agreed with Howard that Blair was “telling lies” to win, 51% said the same of Howard himself.

For now, the Conservatives’ best hopes rest on turning their loyalists out at a greater rate than the complacent Laborites, a strategy boosted by a survey for the Financial Times two weeks ago that showed Labor’s lead among those “certain” to vote at only 2 percentage points. A week earlier, it had been 7 points, the paper said.

In recent days, Blair and the rest of the Labor ticket have responded to the apathy threat, putting renewed focus on everything Labor has achieved, especially the strong economy. “If you value it, vote for it,” goes their new slogan.

On Monday, a holiday in Britain, the three major candidates were campaigning all day, contending that the election was still wide open. Blair unveiled a campaign billboard that said, “If one in 10 Labor voters don’t vote, the Tories win.”

Vernon Bogdanor, a noted government professor at Oxford University, expects the subject of the Iraq war to have little direct effect on voters.

“The only effect it might have is whether Blair is trustworthy,” he said. “But whether he is seen like that or not, people still prefer him to Michael Howard.”

He also said voters were willing to acknowledge the improvement in hospitals and schools under Labor’s watch.

“Conservatives may promise tax cuts, but people are worried they will also cut public services,” he said. “Labor [is] seen to be efficient on the economy, and that’s what people care about.”

George Jones, emeritus professor of government at the London School of Economics, predicted a Labor victory, although with a reduced parliamentary majority.

“This is understandable for a government that has been in for a long period and disappointed many people,” he said. The opposition had failed to get traction from that discontent, he said.

“Calling Mr. Blair a liar and injecting a personal, spiteful element into the campaign to me shows how desperate the Conservatives are,” Jones said.

In a reflective mood on his campaign bus last week, Blair told Sky Television he was feeling more at peace with himself despite the recent bruising he’d taken.

“Perhaps when I first started the job I was a bit too much of all things to all people, and that’s natural again when you’ve never been in government before,” he said.

“And now I prefer it, in a way, as it is now. I feel, funnily enough, even with all the stuff that they talk about ... I’ve got a greater sense of this is where I stand, this is what I believe in,” he said.

“I may be less popular -- I mean, obviously I am, in one sense -- but I feel actually more capable of making the thing work in the interest of the people we represent, and that’s important to me.”

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Janet Stobart of The Times’ London Bureau contributed to this report.

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Party poll

British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s Labor Party is ahead in the latest Populus survey, conducted for the Times of London newspaper:

Labor: 42%

Conservatives: 29%

Liberal Democrats: 21%

Other: 8%

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How the poll was conducted: 1,427 randomly chosen adults were surveyed by telephone April 27-30; margin of error is plus or minus 3 percentage points.

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Source: Populus Ltd.