Britain's Rattled Blair

...The unemployment level in Britain is at present considerably below those in most of Europe...

...Despite recent opinion poll losses, Blair's government has remained more popular after three years in office than any previous British government since polling began...

...One immediate effect of Blair's bungling could have historic significance...

...The man he chose was forced to step down...

...According to Derek Draper, one of the team of backroom operatives who crafted the campaign that led to Blair's phenomenal popularity, New Labor is now rightly seen by the voters "as a mishmash of the good, the bad and the incomprehensible, riddled with spin and gimmicks...

...Neither futile Socialist dogma nor heartless, unbridled free enterprise would be the path along which he would lead Britain to a buoyant future...

...He publicly proposed that policemen on the beat be empowered to take thugs who threatened people or disturbed the peace to the nearest cash machine and require them to pay a $ 150 fine on the spot...

...William Hague, the Conservative Party leader, has made little impression on the electorate...

...IT IS HARD to pinpoint when the image of New Labor began to unravel...

...The New Labor brand," he contended, "has been badly contaminated...

...A week is a long time in politics," he observed...

...It may have been with a sequence of peripheral PR disasters at the turn of this year...

...For each one Blair and his band of New Labor crusaders had a plan, or a team working on apian...

...of late, in a remarkable turnaround, he has at times looked shaken and bewildered...

...Britain is in the process of deciding whether it will adopt the euro as its currency...

...That is what other members of the European Union have done, and more than half of Britain's trade is with Europe...

...As shown in one of those Gould memos, some of them think of New Labor as a "brand," as if a political philosophy is a commodity that has to be continually marketed, like ketchup...

...Brown and Blair rose through the ranks of Labor side-by-side...

...He's all spin and presentation...

...Within the Labor Party, too, grumblings grew louder...

...Subsequently, the Dome proved a flop with the public and may be sold to a Japanese consortium...

...Bright young government aides, drawn to what was supposed to be Tony Blair's Camelot, were said to be the source of disparaging press comments about former Cabinet Office Minister Mo Molam and former Health Minister Harriet Harman...

...International Development Minister Clare Short publicly chastised Defense Secretary Geoff Hoon's ministry for exorbitant charges when her department used RAF helicopters in disaster rescue operations...

...Not long afterward, Blair's attempt to choose the Mayor of London failed when the traditionally pro-Labor stronghold voted instead for maverick Ken Livingstone, who had been expelled from the party...

...In any event, despite the forebodings of his advisers, he is not threatened politically at the moment...

...Meanwhile, the Prime Minister has learned from his doleful experiences of thepastmonths...

...But opinion polls testified that the electorate continued to accept assurances that things would soon get better...

...No one promised nirvana...

...White House public opinion guru Stanley Greenberg and former Bill Clinton adviser Dick Morris were called in to assess the situation here, and to explain how the President has retained high ratings with the American electorate in the face of his missteps and humiliations...

...Plans to exploit millennium fever—new century, New Labor—went awry on New Year's Eve, at the very moment the theme was to begin paying off...

...What Blair had to do was maintain his stance as a leader who knows exactly where he is going, especially when it comes to improving public services and raising living standards...

...Nevertheless, Blair's achievements have been substantial...

...The vision of a line of drunken hoodlums—the kind who batter one another senseless at soccer matches—lined up and trying to remember their pin numbers, causedmuch mirth throughout the land...

...A radical restructuring of the country's badly stretched social services in just three years, after prolonged neglect, was certainly not realistic...

...counterparts...

...began to resonate across London at the same time doubts about proclaimed public service improvements took firm hold...

...Press spokesman Campbell, known for his arrogance, has been shifted to a lower profile job...

...Every problem was defined...

...Blair believes joining the euro single currency system could be the key to Britain's continuing and growing prosperity...

...Despite the relentless spinning from 10 Downing Street, a nagging suspicion spread that New Labor had lost its focus...

...Some of Blair's schemes have already been subjected to sharp criticism...

...Perhaps with a new baby at home in Downing Street he hasn't been getting enough sleep...

...Once sure of himself in a way Wilson could only pretend to be, Blair has discovered in the past few months that even a single day can be a distressingly long time for the Labor Party government he heads...

...London Times columnist Simon Jenkins asserted, "Ours is a nation of losers, an entire country on a longterm downward streak...

...He thus appeared to be conceding it was crucial for his image to be burnished...

...Meanwhile, a number of Cabinet members began feuding...

...That was indeed eye-catching...

...At the end of last year, he appeared politically invulnerable...

...A recent day that started off well with his announcement of much needed extra public services funding, for example, turned sour by evening when a humiliating leak to the newspapers uncovered a confidential memo from Philip Gould, the Prime Minister's friend and public opinion adviser, telling him he was totally out of touch...

...The government wasn't responsible for organizing the affair, but having enthusiastically backed the erection of the expensive symbol, it was made to look clumsy...

...A leaked memorandum on the speech from opinion pollster Gould said the impression was that Blair "lacks conviction...

...Problems were explained away as temporary glitches by a public relations campaign kept tightly "on message" by Alistair Campbell, a former tabloid journalist who was the Prime Minister's press officer and trusted confidant...

...But Clinton's Democratic Party never enjoyed the popularity New Labor does on its worst day...

...Blair has implicitly denied reports that they agreed years ago to take turns at the top job when their party came to power...

...His credibility has been undermined, and his hopes of exerting control over a party prone to fraternal strife have been dealt a body blow...

...There is, of course, no guarantee that the efforts to rehabilitate Britain's public services will be effective...

...But others in the party began to question whether the Prime Minister deserved the trust and backing he had received...

...Foreign investment is pouring into the country...

...He just says things to please people not because he believes them...

...As a matter of fact, only extraordinary public relations ineptness has enabled New Labor to be turned into an object of derision...

...New Labor dazzled the nation with ideas for everything the Conservatives had let slip into disrepair—education, transportation, health care, pensions, crime control, the works...

...Now Prime Minister Tony Blair has reason to believe that was an understatement...

...Because of wretched planning, many distinguished guests, including newspaper editors (the wrong people to alienate), had to spend hours getting to a party being held at the massive, newly built Millennium Dome on the Thames—meant to be a graphic glorification of Britain's resurgence...

...Still, the ideas being acted upon now, and the funding, are far more promising than anything the country has witnessed in recent decades...

...The complaint, "Can we do anything right...

...It is difficult to grasp why, instead of spooking Blair with warnings of impending disaster, his advisers did not simply stress the importance of forging ahead with reforms everyone knew would take time to filter through to the populace...

...After holding back on a lot of spending in order to firm up the British economy and the Treasury's resources, his government embarked this summer on a long-planned, well-funded program of investments to deal with problems it has been accused of trying to conceal...

...Gould will be offering his comments in person, rather than through doom-laden memos...

...But if New Labor again finds itself in as much of a confused mess, or in more basic trouble, it may be time for Brown's turn at the helm...

...Best-selling novelist Ken Follett, formerly a generous contributor to the Labor Party's coffers, went so far as to call the Prime Minister "immoral" for failing to live up to his initial promise...

...Similarly, a sterling performance fighting off Conservative Party gibes in the House of Commons was pre-empted in the London Evening Standard by a report of backstabbing among his senior aides...

...The opening of the towering millennium London Ferris wheel on a bank of the Thames was also embarrassingly delayed and then had structural problems, as did the new millennium footbridge across the Thames that had to be closed for repairs immediately after its delayed opening...

...Consequently, dissident voices have regained some of the strength that New Labor's triumphant arrival on the scene had initially denied them...

...Blair has placed excessive trust in the anxious musings of his special advisers...

...So was another leaked memo by Gould, who warned that according to his calculations the Conservatives could win the next election...

...Invited as a guest speaker to a conference of Britain's highly respected Women's Institute, he astoundingly managed to provoke normally decorous middle-aged, middleclass women to mockery by attempting to score political points at the traditionally nonpolitical event...

...True, like most politicians Blair promised more than could be delivered quickly, if at all...

...At this stage at least, the Conservatives cannot be considered a serious threat to continued Labor Party rule...

...It was echoed repeatedly in the following months as the sports-mad country's athletes were consistently outclassed in high profile international soccer, tennis, and golf matches...

...Things have gone downhill for the Prime Minister with remarkable suddenness...

...Blair himself then tried his hand at an eye-catching initiative...

...Wanted: Eye-Catching Initiatives Britain's Rattled Blair By Norman Gelb London Harold Wilson, Britain's Labor Prime Minister from 1964 to '70 and again from 1974 to '76, was profoundly aware that public opinion is fickle...

...Figures on the far Left, opposed to Blair's Third Way from the start, had been effectively marginalized...

...THE ABSURD PART of all of this is that it is a gross overreaction...

...When he tried to impose a leader on the Welsh Labor Party, the Labor faithful in Wales sent up an angry howl that the Prime Minister was acting contrary to the wishes of his local supporters...

...Some—notably health care, transport and crime control—were getting demonstrably worse...

...Others seem to require more money or trained personnel than will ever be available...

...It gradually became apparent, however, that several key areas were not improving...

...Apparently misreading the message in Gould's memo, Blair wrote one of his own that was also leaked...

...Inflation and mortgage rates are comparatively low as well...

...Lobby" correspondents, the British equivalent of the White House press corps' inner circle, were regularly briefed on how well things were going...

...The outlook for Blair already seemed to include a second term...

...And the Prime Minister's ability to sway the electorate on this issue has, as Gould might put it, been contaminated...

...To boot, a series of incidents made Blair look personally foolish...

...Interestingly, one prominent New Labor figure has emerged from its descent relatively unscathed...

...Or why those advisers and pulse checkers did not recognize that there was no reason to panic, even if the electorate was getting restless and the press was snapping at his heels...

...And even the Prime Minister's friends admit he has said some foolish things of late...

...Just three years ago, Blair was swept into office with the largest House of Commons majority in modern British history...

...The British people are no longer being told everything is constantly getting better, but that some things will improve in three years time, as the full effects of different reforms are felt, and others probably five years down the road...

...Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott openly displayed his lack of esteem for Peter Mandelson, another of Blair's most trusted advisers (and currently Northern Ireland Secretary...

...That Blair, a lawyer by training, could publicly suggest such an unworkable and probably illegal procedure was a clear indication of his being badly rattled...

...But public opinion is strongly opposed to abandoning the pound sterling the way the Germans, for instance, are abandoning the Deutsche mark...

...It called on his chief aides to come up with "eye-catching initiatives" and said, "I should be personally associated with as much of this as possible...

...That was meant to be flippant, but many people had already come to the same conclusion about their government...

...He had transformed the lumbering workhorse image the Labor Party had taken on over the years into "New Labor...

...If Labor lost half its current parliamentary majority in the next elections, it would still be firmly entrenched in power...

...Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown, the man in charge of guiding the British economy, has shied clear of its sorrier aspects and retained a reputation for fortitude, independence and foresight...

...There is no denying, though, that Blair has been damaged...

...The "Third Way" that Blair promoted —as did Social Democratic politicians elsewhere—attracted popular support across the political spectrum here...

...Britain was lifted from the malaise it had slipped into during 18 years of increasingly weary, sometimes sleazy, Conservative Party rule...

...The problem may be that they have been overly influenced by the experiences of their U.S...