THE BLAIR BOUNCE

...He is known by intimates to be a devout Christian, edging toward Catholicism, but he does not flaunt his religious beliefs or discuss them in public...

...A faction in his own Labor Party has accused him of distorting the actual achievements of his policies in glowing progress reports, while failing to conduct promised reforms of the country's troubled social services...

...Soon afterward, he unveiled—with Brown—his latest set of ambitious plans for reforming Britain's social services...

...Like all national leaders, Blair is concerned about how he will be judged by history...

...The EU also offers its constituent nations industrial subsidies, budgetary support for deprived regions, reduced border restrictions, and other benefits...

...The late Prime Minister Harold Macmillan was once asked what had been most disruptive to his intended plans...

...Yet Brown was effortlessly brushed aside when he suggested, none too subtly, that it was time for his boss to move on...

...From the moment Blair came into office, during the Clinton Administration, he emphasized that Britain's "special relationship" with the United States would be as crucial to his foreign policy as it was to Winston Churchill's during World War II...

...Public opinion here is largely proKerry, but there is little understanding of exactly what the challenger stands for...

...The British satirical magazine Private Eye runs a regular column supposedly penned by "Tony," the naïve, scatterbrained, goofy vicar of the imaginary parish of St...

...Great numbers of migrants, newly arrived or already settled in both countries—from Latin America, Asia, the Muslim world, and elsewhere—have brought with them different values and backgrounds that stand apart from British-American experience...

...Mass circulation London tabloids ridicule him as "Tony Blur" and "Tony Bliar...

...policies, as only an ally could...

...Interest rates and inflation levels here have been kept low, though they are now edging higher...

...Iraq policy all along...

...He is denounced for acting in an arrogantly un-British "presidential" manner...

...Unlike the relatively small group of Labor MPs who can't stand the prime minister, Brown is a Blair loyalist...

...If Senator John Kerry comes out on top in November, the prime minister will surely want to establish official and personal rapport with him too...

...One hundred thousand Britons joined a protest march against Bush when he came to London last winter...

...some antiBlair sentiment is firmly rooted at both ends of the political spectrum...

...Intense and widespread criticism, even denigration, of the prime minister has been on the rise here...

...Many Labor parliamentarians would fear for their jobs at election time if their party became embroiled in a leadership tussle...

...The prime minister is said to be discreetly pressing Washington to re-engage actively in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process...

...The unemployment level, at 4.8 per cent, is said by experts to be drifting toward effective full employment of the available labor force...

...A recent decision here will likely make Britain the world's leader in stem cell research—which the Bush Administration is pressing to ban globally...

...Charles Moore, columnist for the Right-wing Daily Telegraph and a longtime Blair critic who has accused him of "unscrupulousness with facts," concedes that for all his faults the prime minister is "brave, eloquent and in charge...

...It is believed that the difference between a Brown administration and the status quo would be marginal...

...But in international as well as human affairs, the most ardent of liaisons can be undone by chance...

...Most of this country's foreign trade is now conducted with fellow EU members rather than the U.S...

...Investment and foreign trade are booming...

...One of his goals is to make Labor Britain's natural governing party, as the Conservative Party was not so long ago...

...Former Deputy Party Leader Roy Hattersley quips that he can remember when Britain "actually had a Labor government...

...There are already signs he will try to foster the same level of intimacy with the Kerrys that the Blairs had with the Clintons...

...The affinity between leaders—Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt, Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, Blair and Clinton, Blair and Bush—has been marked by a camaraderie reflecting deep cultural and historical ties...

...I am told they sell well...

...Blair attained that distinction in the wake of four successive Labor defeats, leading the party out of the political wilderness of the Thatcher years...

...Many here who would otherwise be more tolerant of what they consider Blair's domestic shortcomings are furious with him for lining up with American neoconservatives to undertake Operation Iraqi Freedom...

...A trained barrister, he is effortlessly articulate under pressure in television interviews and parliamentary debates...

...Overtures in that direction were initiated by Ann Taylor, Ross Cranston and other Blairite MPs who renewed old friendships with senior Democrats at the party's July National Convention in Boston...

...They long for the time when their leader did not treasure his connections with the business community, did not entertain the philosophy of "public-private partnership," and did not consider militant union officials enemies of progress...

...People say they hate him, but they really don't...

...He shared Clinton's view that "our unbreakable alliance" helped to bring "unparalleled peace, prosperity and security" to the world...

...neocons had nothing to do with Blair's decision to ally with America in Iraq...

...Charisma is another element of the Labor leader's staying power...

...The prime minister himself differs sharply with the President on such issues as capital punishment, environmental protection and stem cell research...

...Michael Meacher, once Blair's environment minister, has expressed outrage that neither the electorate, nor the party, nor Parliament has dumped Blair...

...Blair's self-presentation is persuasive to those not driven by political frustration or opposing ideology...

...He is always well informed and exudes an unpretentious selfconfidence that many critics claim is a lawyer's trick...

...But in his own land Tony Blair projects a different, more complicated image...

...Political scientist Timothy Garton Ash says that before Britain lines up with Kerry on international affairs, "We have to agree not just on the rules of engagement but on who exactly the enemy is and what creek we're up...

...Political bonds between Britain and the United States have been particularly strong in recent decades...

...Former London Times editor Simon Jenkins asks, "By what act of self-delusion, by what lunacy, did a Labor government sign up to this absurd clique, this aberration...

...He himself continues to maintain it had to be done...

...A recent survey of supporters of the main opposition Conservative Party indicated that most of them believe his re-election is locked up...

...Andrew Brown of the Guardian says Blair has "the knack of unforced reasonableness...

...Indeed, an English friend who had never before displayed any interest in American politics now quotes AI Franken to me...

...By contrast, my local bookshop, which is part of a chain, boasts a prominently placed rack of anti-Bush volumes...

...But so far exasperation with Blair has not spurred any of his prominent critics within the party to challenge his leadership...

...Nevertheless, Blair's public image has been damaged by what the Economist terms his "complicity with an administration in Washington that many Britons never much cared for and now roundly loathe...

...Albion (an ancient name of England...

...Expectations that the respected Robin Cook, who resigned as foreign secretary over Iraq, might do so have gone unfulfilled...

...he talks, with attractive intimacy, as if delivering a fireside chat by the light of burning manifestos...

...Although the column mocks the prime minister, he emerges from it seeming compassionate and cheerful, essentially a decent chap— even if that is not the caricature the magazine intends...

...Moore says he has shown himself to be not merely a momentarily upgraded party chief— as so many in his office have been—but a forceful national leader...

...Anti-Bush tirades from France and Germany were seen as serving no useful purpose...

...Another threat comes from multiculturalism...

...Blair grew concerned that they had rendered the United States a humiliated superpower, capable of lashing out impulsively...

...Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown, long Blair's heir apparent, recently did try to hasten the prime minister's departure from 10 Downing Street...

...Still, these days the links binding the two nations are being subjected to formidable pressures, both geopolitical and demographic...

...Events, dear boy," he replied...

...According to a Treasury report, during Blair's reign Britain has enjoyed the longest sustained period of economic growth in two centuries...

...A British diplomat once described the kinship between the two countries as "a longstanding extramarital affair, arising entirely from natural affection...

...On the far Left, the prime minister is condemned as a traitor who has abandoned Labor's fundamental principles...

...He must take comfort in reports that the Conservatives—whose opinion poll figures are feeble, despite Blair's seeming vulnerability—are in such despair that some senior Tories have contemplated changing their party's historic name...

...One explanation for Blair's political security is Britain's economic strength...

...By contrast, joblessness in France is at 9.4 per cent...

...There has never been any insinuation that he uses his office for private gain, beyond accepting the lavish hospitality of well-heeled foreign friends during his vacations...

...This summer thousands queued outside a Piccadilly bookstore to see Bill Clinton and buy the ex-President's memoir...

...In a recent poll, two-thirds of the respondents said they do not trust him...

...His spokesmen argue that under the circumstances it was proper for him to try to influence U.S...

...On a personal level, Blair enjoys an amiable relationship with the President...

...That is not completely true...

...The extent of his influence on the Bush Administration's Middle East strategy, of course, remains unclear...

...His effort, greeted by many as a cheap stunt, needs the support of the House of Commons, which is constitutionally empowered to remove the prime minister from office...

...The prime minister pointedly declared that he still has much important work to do, and "my appetite for doing it is undiminished...

...But there is more to to the current alliance than that...

...Neither British nor American heads of state have ever exhibited similar feelings for their other foreign peers...

...Die-hard Conservatives loathe Blair for hugging the middle ground, thereby propelling them further to the Right than they would otherwise be...

...Few doubt he will glide to a third term as prime minister in elections next year...

...Despite current public resistance here, these and other forthcoming lures may induce Britain to accept closer integration with continental Europe in the near future, a process that might chip away at its connections to the U.S...

...In August Adam Price, an MP from the Welsh nationalist Plaid Cymru Party, moved for Blair's impeachment by invoking a procedure last used in 1848, the obscure "Principle of Ministerial Accountability," with regard to Iraq...

...It is unlikely, however, that its overwhelming Labor majority would toss out the best vote-getter the party has ever fielded...

...Many feel emasculated by his success over the past decade in transforming their party into the centrist "New Labor," and they resent his pride in that accomplishment...

...The President called on Blair and Queen Elizabeth during that visit, but did not risk a public appearance or a visit to the House of Commons...

...The 9/11 attacks added an important dimension to the relationship...

...Asked once whether he and President George W. Bush prayed together when Blair visited the U.S., he made it clear he felt the question was inappropriate...

...While prewar intelligence on Iraq has been proved faulty, Blair's camp claims his stance has contributed to White House acceptance of the need for international efforts in Iraq's reconstruction...

...Spokesmen for the prime minister insist the U.S...

...The most bitter of the public's charges is that Blair dragged Britain into war in Iraq without just cause...

...Nick Robinson, political editor of Britain's Independent Television News, quotes a Conservative parliamentarian as sorrowfully observing that Blair "is untouchable...

...In any event, it is thought unlikely that Blair has swayed Vice President Dick Cheney or Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, perceived here as the hard-liners running U.S...

...A critical factor in Blair's paradoxical standing has largely been ignored by the media: Alongside the scores doubting his integrity, countless others believe he is a sincere and virtuous man whose only driving objective as a politician is the well-being of Britons...

...One source of strain is Britain's membership in the expanding 25-nation European Union (EU...

...They say unpoliticized British intelligence reports convinced him that the need to launch a preventive war against Saddam Hussein was urgent...

...Events...

...Yet despite the surge of criticism, Blair has little to fear politically...

...Similarly, late murmurings about the emergence of a nohope "stalking horse" candidate on the Left, or "Old Labor" going its own way in a party split, have not as yet been realized...

...Reportedly his wife, Chérie, had to be persuaded not to make her abhorrence of some of Bush's domestic policies obvious when she accompanied her husband for their first meeting in Washington...

...Norman Gelb writes regularly for The New Leader on British affairs...

...Blair biographer Philip Stephens goes so far as to claim the prime minister feared America would "jump out of the international system," with potentially dangerous consequences, if Bush was forced to go it alone in Iraq...

...Concern has been expressed about his leanings toward increased protectionism in international commerce...