Lo and behold, last week brought another round of dismal tidings, these even worse than usual. A few were hardy perennials, like widespread dissatisfaction with Britain’s public services. Others came along more recently, including the widening post-September 11 rift between the United States and Europe that Blair has worked hard to bridge. And some were brand-new, among them the pesky question of an alleged political payoff. When Blair lent a helping hand to an Indian steel magnate seeking to buy a Romanian plant, was he rewarding the businessman for a £125,000 contribution to the Labour Party a few weeks earlier? For all the controversy, Blair’s poll ratings actually ticked upward. much to Campbell’s satisfaction.
The jousting between Downing Street Pollyannas and Fleet Street Cassandras revolves on a single question: are Tony’s Teflon days numbered, and if so, what’s the so-called tipping point, where he goes from up to down with voters? One scenario, suggesting Blair is headed for a fall, goes like this: Blair may seem invulnerable to the political bad news that periodically envelops him. But at some point, the public will tire of Blair’s unfulfilled promises to improve Britain’s railways, hospitals, schools and the like. Pledges will begin to look like lies; Blair will begin to look like he’s out of touch and doesn’t care. His very insouciance will sign his political death warrant. Once the fond hope of Blair’s opponents, this calculation has begun to be picked up in recent weeks even by supporters and partisan journalists.
Another scenario comes from within Blair’s own ranks. In this version, the prime minister has plenty of time to set things right. By big margins, voters still blame the Conservative Party for virtually all of Britain’s ills. Those same voters remain grateful to Blair and the Labour Party for having ended 18 years of Tory rule. The strength of the British economy, the healthiest of the world’s largest economies, has purchased the patience of the British people. Unperturbed by real political opposition–the defeated Conservatives remain largely ineffectual–Blair can afford to make sensible investments in public services without overheating the economy. Indeed, some in public education have already paid off; Labour’s private polling shows rising levels of satisfaction among parents with children in state schools. Blair’s people calculate that improvements in other public services will kick in in time for the next election and defuse any nascent anti-Blair sentiments.
This race against time, pitting insouciance against investment, will determine Blair’s political future. His team believes it has a firm grasp on the timetable. Critics are equally convinced they don’t. But there’s a pair of wild cards in this calculus that could drastically affect the outcome: the euro and taxes.
Blair has said Britain won’t join Europe’s single currency unless economic convergence passes certain tests and Britons give the government a green light in a referendum. Since 1997, Britons have cooled to the single currency, though recent polling suggests attitudes may be shifting. There has been speculation that Blair will launch a pro-euro campaign this year in advance of a referendum–a move that some economists believe could destabilize the British economy. On the tax front, Blair and his cohorts last week began softening up the electorate for a tax hike to fund improvements in Britain’s creaky National Health Service. Labour’s polling shows that the electorate is willing to pay the price if the money is earmarked for health. But Blair’s success is built partly on his reputation as a fiscal conservative who eschewed “old” Labour’s tax-and-spend doctrine. A whiff of higher taxes could thus not only have an unsettling effect on the economy, but on Blair’s own electoral fortunes as well.
The good news for Blair is that he has some control over both of these events. He will happily override his pro-European instincts if plunging into a single-currency campaign looks like bad politics. Similarly, if raising taxes seems a bad idea, he won’t do it. Sure, other “X factors” could muddy the picture. If, for example, the United States were to invade Iraq and make a hash of it, energy prices could spiral out of control and send the British economy into the tank. But short of that, Blair still looks able to suffer through endless “worst weeks” without enduring much political pain.
Meanwhile, Alastair Campbell will go on keeping score. Not long ago he had his staff do a search of British newspapers for articles over the past year with the words Blair, government and crisis in the same paragraph. They came up with 679. I did the same search at the end of last week and came up with 978. At that rate, Campbell’s going to need a new filing cabinet.
