Clinton is, of course, history, but Blair is very much with us. Winning re-election last week–nearly duplicating the huge majority of 179 seats out of 657 in Parliament that he got in 1997–Blair has replaced Clinton as the premier center-left statesman on the world stage. Blair’s huge victory affirmed the restoration of his Labour Party, which spent 18 years in the wilderness under the Tory rule of Margaret Thatcher and John Major. Blair’s first term was hardly problem-free. Labour’s left wing badgered him, urging him to use his mandate of four years ago to increase spending on schools and hospitals. Now he believes he can loosen the purse strings a bit. “It has been a remarkable and historic victory for my party,” Blair said last week in his victory speech. “It is a mandate for reform and investment in the future.”
The Blair landslide was a humiliating defeat for the Conservative opposition, which is in total disarray. The Tories didn’t manage to gain a single seat more than they had in the previous election. Their leader, William Hague, swiftly announced his resignation. Britain’s chattering classes talk endlessly about the “Americanization” of British politics. But while Blair consciously copied Clinton’s centrist, business-friendly policies, Hague mangled his attempts to adopt the “compassionate conservatism” that worked well for George W. Bush last year. Instead, Hague drove his party to the right, carping about “bogus asylum seekers” and decrying the supposed breakdown of law and order in a tone more reminiscent of Richard Nixon than Bush. Hague vaguely echoed Bush’s disdain for border-blurring multilateralism with his patriotic campaign to “save the pound”–a strident appeal to keep Britain out of the European single-currency scheme. But even there Blair cleverly defused the issue by promising to put it before the voters in a referendum.
Blair, an Oxford-educated cosmopolitan who once addressed French legislators in their own language, is not a natural fit for Bush. With Clinton, he enjoyed a personal rapport that transcended even the usual Labour-Democrat compatibility. But Blair is an Atlanticist as well as a European, and he is determined that Britain get the most out of the traditional “special relationship” with Washington. Bush, for his part, needs British support more than ever as he heads into a minefield of suspicion on the Continent this week. The two leaders have a head start: when they met in Washington in February, Bush said, “He put the charm offensive on me–and it worked.” While bonding at Camp David, the two very different men discovered they used the same toothpaste (Colgate). That doesn’t exactly conjure up Roosevelt-Churchill, or even Clinton-Blair. But it’s a beginning.
