THE MASOCHISM CAMPAIGN; LETTER FROM LONDON

DAVID REMNICK. The New Yorker. New York: May 2, 2005

 

Not long before making a series of visits to No. 10 Downing Street, I was reading the novel that everyone in London seemed to be poring over in the cafes and on the benches in St. James's Park--Ian McEwan's "Saturday," which is set on February 15, 2003, the day of the worldwide antiwar demonstrations. The central character is a middle-aged neurosurgeon named Henry Perowne. He is prosperous, fortunate in his wife and two children, happy, yet haunted by the onset of middle age; and although he is not especially political, he is pained and ambivalent about Tony Blair's support of the American-led invasion of Iraq. At one point, Perowne recalls meeting Blair. As a member of the Royal College of Surgeons, he'd been invited to the opening of the Tate Modern, where he and his wife, Rosalind, were among four thousand guests. Perowne wanders into a huge gallery and suddenly finds himself next to Blair, who is, as ever, eager to shake hands, to forge a connection.

"I really admire the work you're doing," Blair says. "In fact, we've got two of your paintings hanging in Downing Street. Cherie and I adore them." Clearly, Blair has taken Perowne to be one of the Tate's artists, and, after thinking it through, Perowne decides on honesty.

"You're making a mistake," he says.

"And, and on that word, there passed through the Prime Minister's features for the briefest instant a look of sudden alarm, of fleeting self-doubt," McEwan writes. "A hairline fracture had appeared in the assurance of power."

To follow British politics these past weeks, to watch Blair campaign for a third term--Election Day is May 5th--is to witness a politician putting himself in the way of any audience, any camera, anyone who will have him. His aides call it "the masochism campaign." The punishment is daily and takes many forms. During a televised meet-the-voters session in Coventry, Blair's declaration that he had improved the National Health Service was answered by Mrs. Valerie Holsworth, who told him that she had so despaired of finding an available N.H.S. dentist that she'd used her husband's pliers to yank her own rotten teeth--four of them. As proof, she readily displayed her gums. Blair winced in sympathy. At a Downing Street press conference, a tabloid reporter reacted to the Government's proud announcement of a hike in the minimum wage by asking Blair, "Would you be willing to wipe someone's bottom for this 'higher' minimum wage?" And, at a lunchtime session at No. 10 with British journalists, I heard a reporter say that Blair had appeared on the cover of Attitude, a magazine much like Out, which led him to ask the Prime Minister, "Are you a gay icon?" In every case, one saw the "hairline fracture in the assurance of power," the Halloween rictus, a practiced yet futile attempt to mask embarrassment or anger with a smile that hopes to project sincerity, patience, and (the essential category of pollsters) likability.

The masochism campaign is a kind of political rope-a-dope, the idea being that through constant exposure to Blair's kindly endurance, his lucid, if canned, explanations, the electorate will eventually weary of its lingering anger and distrust--primarily over Blair's unwavering support of George W. Bush--and will come around to conceding that the Conservatives, under the forgettable Michael Howard, have little to offer but fear-mongering on issues like asylum-seeking immigrants from Asia and Eastern Europe, and that the left-leaning Liberal Democrats are still a marginal party in the House of Commons promoting, as one Blair aide airily put it, "the ideology of bicyclists."

In a sense, after eight years of crisis and grating propinquity, Blair has to revive the notion of his own charm. When he came to power, in 1997, as the standard-bearer of New Labour, he ended eighteen years of Tory rule and the distinct possibility that Labour would never head a government again. Blair did not possess quite the glamour of a Kennedy, but, compared with his managerial predecessor, John Major, he was positively vibrant, promising a progressive revival as thorough as Margaret Thatcher's conservative revolution. He was just forty-three, the youngest Prime Minister since the Napoleonic Wars. His majority in the House of Commons was the biggest since 1935. He became the first Labour Party premier ever to last two consecutive terms, winning votes not just among the urban elites and the urban poor, the Labour base, but among traditional Tory voters in the suburbs of Middle England. Now, despite a rudderless opposition, Blair will be relieved if he wins a third term with a less gaudy majority in the Commons than he has enjoyed. His campaign's only anxiety is a sullen apathy among Labour voters. The Tories point to the 1970 campaign, when Harold Wilson's Labour Government held a decisive lead only to be dumped from office by the Tory Edward Heath.

The masochism campaign is a daily operation. One morning, I stood in one of the second-floor drawing rooms of No. 10 as a group of television technicians set up their cameras, microphones, and lights for a taping with Little Ant and Little Dec, two ten-year-old adorables who specialize in faux-naif celebrity interviews for an ITV variety show called "Ant and Dec's Saturday Night Takeaway." Little Ant and Little Dec sat jammed together into one of Downing Street's better armchairs waiting for the Prime Minister. They wore little black suits and their hair was pomaded. Their names are Dylan McKenna-Redshaw and James Pallister, and they are the Mini-Mes of the show's oleaginous grownup stars, Ant and Dec.

"Boys! Sit up straight!"

This was the voice of Georgie Herford-Jones, the show's producer. Herford-Jones, who resembles the young Linda Evans, had complete command of her puppies. When she barked, they straightened in the chair, and when she raised a brow they commenced rehearsing the wiseacre questions that had been scripted for them. The idea was to be both cute and rude, a kids-say-the-darnedest-things routine. They'd interviewed the midfielder David Beckham, Posh Spice's husband. "You and your wife just had your third kid," one question went. "My dad says you must be at it like rabbits. What does he mean?" They asked Angelina Jolie, "How big is your mouth?" Bruce Willis was so offended by the prepubescent grilling that he walked off the set, earning himself a couple of jabs in the tabloids.

Finally, Blair appeared, wearing no jacket but a genuine smile.

"How ya doin', boys?" he said, settling into a chair opposite Little Ant and Little Dec.

Blair's press aides, David Hill and Hilary Coffman, stood out of camera range and looked eager.

"Seven, eight million people watch this Saturday nights," Hill whispered to me. "For this country, that's huge." Hill had said, repeatedly, that Blair had to "reconnect" with the British public, especially voters who rarely watched the news or read the papers. If some of Blair's natural liberal constituents were staying home to protest his fealty to Bush, he needed new, more forgiving voters. "Saturday Night Takeaway" was the perfect forum in which to show Blair as "accessible, clear, nice."

Little Ant and Little Dec were ready to begin.

The Prime Minister nodded distantly. Low clouds of preoccupation encased him. Not only were the latest polls too tight for absolute comfort; the Pope was on his deathbed and, in a few hours, Blair had a Cabinet meeting where he would face his saturnine Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown. The closest of comrades fifteen years ago, Blair and Brown have run the country in tandem for eight years yet, at times, barely speak. Brown, who had hoped to lead the Party himself, has always bridled at his sidecar position in the arrangement, and his aides regularly leak word of his particular resentments to the conflict-hungry press. For the duration of the campaign, and for the sake of party comity, Blair and Brown would have to behave rather like an angrily divorced couple who must come together on their daughter's wedding day; the price of a spat now could be Blair's election and Brown's ambitions.

The tape rolled. The questions began:

"You run the whole country. Have you always been that bossy?"

"When your children are cheeky, do you ever say, 'How dare you speak to the Prime Minister like that!'?"

"My dad says you've got to be mad to do your job. Are you mad?"

The biggest political story that week had been a campaign by the young television cook Jamie Oliver, "The Naked Chef," to improve school lunches, which are notoriously foul. Little Ant moved in.

"What were your school meals like?"

Before going up to St. John's College, Oxford, Blair attended Fettes, a posh boarding school in Scotland. In Britain, boarding-school food, with its rissoles fried in grease and its wan Brussels sprouts, is no better than the rest, but, still, Blair is rarely eager to remind anyone of Fettes and thus kept his answer vague.

"Have you actually tasted a Turkey Twizzler?" Ant persisted. Turkey Twizzlers, a fatty processed food, had never been on Blair's menu. Another dodge.

With each question, Blair parried in a pleasantly harrumph-ish sort of way, but it became increasingly clear that he had been only casually briefed. In any case, it was impossible to imagine an earlier Prime Minister--Gladstone, Asquith, Churchill, Eden, Macmillan, Thatcher--coping with the inquisitions of Little Ant and Little Dec. Informality was part of Blair's "American" style--"Call me Tony," he told everyone, and everyone did--but now the cost of informality was plain.

Then things got worse. After Blair mentioned that as a student he'd been in a rock-and-roll band called the Ugly Rumors, Little Dec said, "When my aunt makes a smell, she says, 'Oh, my, I think I started an ugly rumor.' Is that where the name comes from?"

Well, no, Blair said, it comes from a Grateful Dead album that--

"If you make an ugly smell, do people pretend not to notice because you is the Prime Minister?"

And then it came: the strained rictus, the hairline fracture . . .

Off-camera, Linda Evans beamed at her little darlings. She occasionally asked them to repeat a flubbed question and kept gesturing for them to sit up in their chair. Blair looked over at her, as if for a sign that this agony was about to end.

"Why does the Labour Party have flowers as its logo? Isn't that a bit . . . girlie?"

The grilling was over at last, but now there was an exchange of presents. One of the boys picked up a shopping bag and handed over several gifts: a bouquet of cheap flowers, some crummy memorabilia from the show, a pair of panties and a pink boa for Blair's wife, Cherie.

"That's for Cherie? What can I say?"

"Say thank you," Little Dec said.

Blair looked over toward the cluster of aides. "I don't believe this!" he said, mock indignant. "I'm not used to interviews like this. I'll try to see who got me into this."

"Yesterday they did Ozzy Osbourne," the father of one of the boys told me.

"How much of this will they use?" Blair asked as he wearily rose from his chair.

"About half."

"I can think of some things to cut out," he said.

Linda Evans informed the Prime Minister that he had to film another scene. Blair had already devoted forty-odd minutes to the Little Ones and he rolled his eyes. And yet he obeyed. Linda Evans told him that the boys would sit on a couch next to a telephone and that he, Blair, would suddenly enter. "You come into the room and you say, 'Good morning, boys. Have you been looked after?' "

Blair nodded moodily, as if he had just received a stern rebuke from the Chancellor of the Exchequer.

We all moved to the next room for the shot. Suddenly, Cherie Blair arrived. Someone had put Little Ant and Little Dec on her schedule, too.

"Hi, guys!" Cherie said brightly.

"This is Little Ant and Little Dec," the Prime Minister said, in just about the same voice one might say, "These are the McCrary twins and they have come to kidnap the children and shoot the dog."

"You're not really called Little Ant and Little Dec, are you?" she said. "You're much cuter than the big ones."

"I was just asking them if they spent more time reading or playing on the PlayStation," Blair said.

"I still read loads," Cherie said. "You must read. It's really important. I love cuddling up in bed with a good book."

"Thank you, dear," the Prime Minister said. "That's what twenty-five years of married life gets you, boys."

Cherie was told that the pink boa was for her. She fingered it and tried to think of something clever to say. All she could manage was "Well! It's been lovely! But I have to go do something about the Olympics!" London is in the hunt to win the Summer Games in 2012. Then she beat it down a flight of stairs.

"Are you jealous of the Queen?" Little Ant asked Blair.

"No. She's the Queen and I'm not."

"Really?"

This was beginning to sound like outtakes from "Krapp's Last Tape."

"Well, she's Queen for a long time. Prime Ministers aren't," Blair said, as he waited for a cue to leave the room and reenter. "What do you want to do when you grow up?"

"Direct," Little Dec said.

At last, Linda Evans said, "Could I get you coming through the door?"

"This one?" Blair asked, pointing. She nodded. He left. He came back in, smiling. Beckett had now bowed to Feydeau.

"Hi, boys! Have you been looked after?"

Dec said, "A nice man called George Bush just called. He's bringing pizzas . . ."

"Whoa!" Linda Evans said, waving her arms. She didn't like the shot. "Um, could we do that once more?"

Blair squinted murderously.

"Right," he said, recovering. "So, I say . . ."

And then he went out the door once again.

A few seconds later, he came back in. The tape was rolling.

"Hi, boys. Have you been looked after?"

"A nice man called George Bush just called. He's bringing pizzas."

Then Tony Blair sighed and said, "Is he bringing one for me?"

After all that, the Prime Minister required what White House schedulers call "a little bit of alone time." I was brought to a waiting room downstairs. Blair lives and works in what must surely be the least commodious headquarters of any leader of a major industrialized state. Downing Street is a small cul-de-sac off Whitehall, and No. 10 is a large, somewhat worn, seventeenth-century town house. (The Blairs and their four children, who range in age from four to twenty-one, live in an apartment above No. 11. The Browns are next door. There is a jungle gym in the back yard.) The Prime Minister does not even have an officially designated office. Margaret Thatcher used a room on the second floor. John Major read documents at the enormous table in the Cabinet Room. Blair occupies a room just outside the Cabinet Room known as "the den," which is just large enough for a couch, a desk, and two armchairs.

By the time Blair greeted me in the den, he seemed well over the depredations of Little Ant and Little Dec.

"It was a piece of fun, that's all," he said gamely, and yet, he went on, "it's always a battle, isn't it, between the modern world in which we live, in which people expect their leaders to be a lot more accessible . . . and the dignity of the office. And you've got to be careful that you don't compromise the one in the attempt to enter into the other."

There is a tendency for political criticism to be sharper among the chattering classes of London than in, say, the Midland suburbs and towns, where concern for foreign policy is dwarfed by issues like binge drinking and discipline in the schools. Nonetheless, it was remarkable how many people had turned on Blair. Even early in his first term, there were those who considered him unbearably pious, prone to empty idealism and windy intellectual pronouncements--a spinner, a glad-hander. As far back as 1997, the joke was that if you called the Downing Street switchboard after hours the answering machine would say, "Please leave a message after the high moral tone." He was Bambi, and Phony Tony. He wasn't especially smart, it was said, nothing like the Labour giants of an earlier generation: Denis Healey, Harold Wilson, Tony Crosland, Richard Crossman. At Oxford, he'd earned a second-class degree, and, well, doesn't everyone at Oxford get a second-class degree just for breathing? Blair's mentor, the late Roy Jenkins, a colossal figure in Parliament and the biographer of Churchill and Gladstone, echoed an old remark about F.D.R. when he told a writer for The Spectator that Blair had "a second-class mind" and "a first-class temperament." Unfortunately for Blair, most people seemed to remember only the former. He was an actor in school--he'd played Mark Antony, and Captain Stanhope in "Journey's End"--and now he was capable of changing his rhetoric, even his accent, as the occasion warranted. Wasn't he just a British version of Bill Clinton with a more settled domestic arrangement? "Blair's like a very sweet pudding," one senior Tory M.P. told me. "The first mouthful is nice, but then it becomes nauseating--the easy emoting, the quivering chin . . ."

It was relentless. Perhaps only in England--the one country where, it is said, the people feel Schadenfreude toward themselves--could a Prime Minister with such promise, and, over time, real accomplishments, be whacked around so mercilessly.

After the war in Iraq, it was something else, more serious. Blair and his team were roundly blamed for "sexing up" an intelligence dossier that had been compiled on Iraq and for presenting conjecture on weapons of mass destruction as incontrovertible fact. Worse, Blair was seen as the "poodle" of Bush and the Pentagon neoconservatives, ignoring domestic opinion and the ambiguity of the intelligence estimates simply to rush into the arms of the American President. So now he was Tony Bliar. And Tony Blur. And the Right Honourable Member for Texas North. Last year, a small group of members of the House of Commons undertook what was, in effect, an impeachment initiative against Blair, with a motion called "Conduct of the Prime Minister in relation to the war against Iraq." If successful, it would be the first impeachment since the proceedings brought against Lord Melville, the First Lord of the Admiralty, in 1806, for embezzlement. Some of Blair's own diplomats thought that he had fudged the case on Iraq. One of his former First Secretaries at the United Nations, Carne Ross, told the BBC, "I personally don't trust him, no. . . . I'm afraid the government did not tell the whole truth about the alleged threat that Iraq posed. That's why I think it's a tawdry story." The rhetoric of his opponents could be unhinged. In the Guardian, once the newspaper of Blair's electoral base, Harold Pinter was quoted as saying, "Blair sees himself as a representative of moral rectitude. He is a mass murderer."

One afternoon, I met with Peter Kilfoyle, a Labour traditionalist in the Commons--"Not Old Labour," he insisted. "Vintage Labour"--at the Pugin Room, one of the many tea rooms inside Westminster. Kilfoyle represents a lower-income constituency in Liverpool. He had been such an early enthusiast among the Party's Old Guard that he'd earned a spot as a minister. He resigned in 2000.

Kilfoyle represents what one journalist called the "flat-cap and pass-the-fish-and-chips" wing of the Party, and, in the end, sounding much like some of Clinton's critics in the Democratic Party, he found Blair to be a trimmer, insensitive to the poor, and inauthentic. "I once took him to a football match," Kilfoyle said. "He showed up in a dark suit and a polo sweater. I said, 'Tony, what the hell? You look like an Apache dancer!' He called Peter Mandelson"--one of Blair's closest advisers at the time--"to ask what he thought. He needed reassurance on how to play the part.

"He's lost his way completely," Kilfoyle continued. "He's trying to re-create the Labour Party, and he's trying to recast it in his own image. The Labour Party was an ideological party and now it's a cult of personality." The Pugin Room was crowded, loud, and smoky. Kilfoyle lit up his fifth Silk Cut of the hour and said, "Look, we all mobilized behind Tony Blair after eighteen years of opposition. Those around him treat him like Chauncey Gardiner in 'Being There.'. . . The best government was postwar Clement Attlee, who really changed this country: with welfare benefits, the health service, massive renewal programs. This Government has just flitted around the edges."

When I asked Kilfoyle if he would support Blair this time around, he smiled and said only, "No comment."

"I'm a critical friend," he said. "If your friend is pissed and says, 'Give me the keys, I'll drive,' you can't say O.K."

It really is remarkable how unwilling Blair's antagonists--whether Tory or Labour--are to give him credit for what's gone right in the past eight years: the lowest rate of inflation since the nineteen-fifties; a sharp decline in unemployment; sustained economic growth for every year in office; a historic breakthrough in the Northern Ireland dispute, leading to the 1998 Good Friday agreement and a near-cessation of violence on all sides; the establishment of a parliament in Scotland, an assembly in Wales, and a mayoralty in London; an improvement in, or, at least, an end to the deterioration of, public services; an increase in the number of doctors, nurses, and dentists (sorry, Mrs. Holsworth!) and a reduction in the waiting period for surgery. Perhaps the most significant of Blair's achievements was to lead the rescue of the Labour Party, which, in the Thatcher-Major years, had seemed destined for marginality as the English working class declined.

Blair risked everything in his decision to support Bush, and, when his case for war turned out to be unfounded, he lost the confidence and trust of much of the population. He will almost certainly win May 5th, but will he win convincingly enough to rule? Or will he suddenly be afloat, a lame duck paddling in the wake of Gordon Brown? Chris Patten, the last British governor of Hong Kong and an avatar of the British political establishment, said, "Never, after eight years, can it be glad, confident morning again. The young leader would look shop-soiled even without Iraq. But Iraq showed the gap between the image and the reality. . . . The real question to be asked about Blair is whether he sacrificed the objective with which he entered office--of making Britain comfortable in Europe--and sacrificed it to President Bush."

The debate over Blair and Iraq centers on two vexed and related subjects: the nature of the Prime Minister's core convictions and the efficacy of the "special relationship" between the United States and Britain.

Two and a half years ago, as Blair made plain that he would be America's strongest political and military ally, Roy Jenkins rose in the House of Lords, and, like Mark Antony in his funeral oration, began with tribute:

I have a high regard for the Prime Minister. I have been repelled by attempts to portray him as a vacuous man with an artificial smile and no convictions. I am reminded of similar attempts by a frustrated Right to suggest that Gladstone was mad, Asquith was corrupt, and Attlee was negligible. My view is that the Prime Minister, far from lacking conviction, has almost too much, particularly when dealing with the world beyond Britain. He is a little Manichean for my perhaps now jaded taste, seeing matters in stark terms of good and evil, black and white, contending with each other, and with a consequent belief that if evil is cast down good will inevitably follow. I am more inclined to see the world and the regimes in it in varying shades of gray.

Although it was left unsaid in which particular shades of gray Roy Jenkins saw the Iraqi Baathists, he was undoubtedly right to see a moralist in his protege. When Blair was at Oxford, in the early seventies, he impressed no one as a budding politico; he was not an activist, nor did he join the Oxford Union or any political groups--not even the student Labour Party. (In fact, his father was a Tory who revered Margaret Thatcher.) He read law, but he also had time for history and political theory, particularly the works of Christian socialists like R. H. Tawney, and, through an older friend at Oxford, an Australian-born vicar named Peter Thomson, he came to read the work of John Macmurray, a Scottish philosopher whose left-of-center Christian thought--a disdain for raw individualism, a yearning for solidarity without collectivization--anticipates the work of some of the American communitarians, as John Rentoul, one of Blair's biographers, writes. Like Blair himself a quarter century later, Macmurray was a philosophical triangulator, rejecting the prescriptive designs of socialism yet accepting its softer Sermon on the Mount generalities. "If you really want to understand what I'm all about," Blair once said, "you have to take a look at a guy called John Macmurray. It's all there."

When Blair was at Oxford, religious observance in England was already in decline, and yet he became observant and was eventually confirmed in the Anglican Church. As a young barrister, he married a colleague, Cherie Booth, who had been reared in the Labour Party and the Catholic Church. Blair often took Communion at Cherie's church, in Islington, in North London, until, in 1996, Cardinal Basil Hume wrote to him and asked that he, as an Anglican with sufficient access to Anglican churches, desist. Blair wrote back obliging the Cardinal, but, with a drop of acid in his pen, added, "I wonder what Jesus would have made of it."

As a Labour Party activist and then as an M.P. from the constituency of Sedgefield, Blair continued speaking about politics in moralistic terms. He was not at all rooted in the socialist, Labour vocabulary of Michael Foot and Tony Benn, following instead the Victorian path of such Liberal Party lights as Gladstone, Asquith, and Lloyd George. He did not, like Gladstone, wander the night streets of London looking to redeem the souls of prostitutes, but he did write with the starch of a parson invoking the awfulness of moral relativism. "Christianity is a very tough religion," he wrote. "It is judgmental. There is right and wrong. There is good and bad."

Blair attends church nearly every Sunday and is said to read the Bible daily (he has even said that he's read the Koran three times, including once when he was on vacation in Portugal), yet he learned over time to avoid mentioning religion in a political context. Statements like "Jesus was a modernizer"--which sounded to some as if the leader of New Labour had brought the Son of God into his fold--caused him enormous grief. In contrast to the United States, where it is nearly a requirement for high office to advertise belief, only seven per cent of the British population attends church regularly, and displays of public piety are scorned as sanctimonious. In 2003, Blair drafted his speech to the nation on Iraq, closing with a solemn "God bless you." His aides, a fairly godless lot, replaced the offending phrase with a simple "Thank you." But the staff cannot undo the image. The satirical magazine Private Eye still calls Blair "the Vicar of St. Albion," and the television interviewers Jeremy Paxman and David Frost have both tried to get a rise out of him by asking if he prayed with George Bush--an idea sure to unnerve many Britons. In one of our interviews, I tried to ask Blair about his religious background, and, predictably, he would not answer. "It leads to all sorts of highways and byways having nothing to do with politics," he said. "I learned my lesson when I actually gave an interview about religion and I was asked the question three times: 'Are you saying that if you are a Christian you have to vote Labour?' Each time, I said no, and the headline was something like 'If You're a Christian, You Have to Vote Labour, Says Blair.' The fact is, you never, ever, ever, in our politics, get into this argument and get out of it without people misconstruing it."

Blair saves his high principles for large occasions. Faced with humanitarian crises in the Balkans and in Sierra Leone, he began to invoke his nineteenth-century predecessors and to make a moral case for military action. On a trip to Bulgaria in 1999, he talked about Gladstone's campaign in the eighteen-seventies to bring attention to atrocities committed there by the Turks. "Today, we face the same questions that confronted Gladstone over one hundred and twenty years ago," he said. "Does one nation or people have the right to impose its will on another? Is there ever a justification for a policy based on the ethnic supremacy of one ethnic group? Can the outside world simply stand by when a rogue state brutally abuses the basic rights of those it governs? Gladstone's answer in 1876 was clear. And so is mine today."

In many ways, Thatcher had prepared the way for New Labour. Not only had she presided over the privatization of major utilities and the contraction of failing industries such as coal and steel; she also showed how a Prime Minister could answer Dean Acheson's postwar challenge when he said that Britain "has lost an empire and has not yet found a role." Like Harold Macmillan before her, Thatcher saw Britain's role as America's closest ally--British Athens playing wise man to the Roman-American superpower.

During the Second World War, the choice, rooted in national interest, had been clear. Churchill told de Gaulle, "Each time I have to choose between you and Roosevelt, I shall always choose Roosevelt." Afterward, Britain wavered between contradictory impulses, between its European allies and its Atlantic alliance. In 1956, during the Suez crisis, when Britain, France, and Israel colluded to seize the canal from Egypt, Anthony Eden acted without Washington's support--a miscalculation that provoked President Eisenhower to unprecedented anger. Britain was forced to withdraw from the canal, and the crisis left the country with a warning: that it should never again ignore America's interest or defy Washington. During the Vietnam War, however, Harold Wilson turned down Lyndon Johnson's request to send troops to Southeast Asia. Then, in the eighties and early nineties, the trend shifted once more. Thatcher's embrace of Ronald Reagan was absolute, a Tory-Republican version of the Athens-Rome model; and, after Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, Thatcher bolstered George H. W. Bush's confidence in the run-up to the Gulf War, telling him, "This is no time to go wobbly."

In the late nineties, when the Europeans and the Clinton Administration were slow to act in Kosovo, Blair repeatedly urged the West to move more forcefully. His remonstrations helped bring on the first major deployment of nato troops since the pact was signed, a half century earlier. The action in Kosovo raised new questions about the conduct of foreign policy, particularly the use of force against sovereign states that had not attacked a neighbor. In 1879, when Gladstone was facing similar questions about humanitarian intervention, he made the Victorian moralist's case:

Remember the rights of the savage, as we call him. Remember that the happiness of his humble home, remember that the sanctity of life in the hill villages of Afghanistan, among the winter snows, is as inviolable in the eye of Almighty God as can be your own.

If he was right about being "morally forced" toward intervention, Gladstone wrote in his diary, then he could consider his work in politics the "great and high election of God."

In 1999, Blair led an England that would brook no mention of the Almighty in politics and had long ago lost the capacities of an imperial power; nevertheless, he was prepared to urge on the world--the new "interdependent world," as he said constantly--an end to Realpolitik and the revival of a morally based interventionism. Blair wrote a speech entitled "Doctrine of the International Community," which he delivered at the Economic Club of Chicago. The modern world, Blair said, could no longer avoid intervening in the sort of crises that it had seen in Bosnia and Rwanda. He laid out five criteria for action:

First, are we sure of our case? War is an imperfect instrument for righting humanitarian distress; but armed force is sometimes the only means of dealing with dictators. Second, have we exhausted all diplomatic options? We should always give peace every chance as we have in the case of Kosovo. Third, on the basis of a practical assessment of the situation, are there military operations we can sensibly and prudently undertake? Fourth, are we prepared for the long term? In the past, we talked too much of exit strategies. But, having made a commitment, we cannot simply walk away once the fight is over; better to stay with moderate numbers of troops than return for repeat performances with large numbers. And, finally, do we have national interests involved? The mass expulsion of ethnic Albanians from Kosovo demanded the notice of the rest of the world. But it does make a difference that this is taking place in such a combustible part of Europe.

During the 2000 U.S. election campaign, Blair's circle was fairly indiscreet in betraying its hope that Al Gore would defeat George Bush. The Clinton-Blair relationship had been one of like-minded brothers (with Clinton in the role of the wise, if erratic, older brother), and Blair's lieutenants, including his chief of staff, Jonathan Powell, had learned many of their campaign techniques and media gambits by observing James Carville, George Stephanopoulos, and Paul Begala in Clinton's first campaign, in 1992. Together, they promoted a fuzzy "third way"--liberal on social issues such as abortion, the environment, and race, centrist on economic issues, such as welfare and deficit spending, and increasingly interventionist abroad.

Initially, there seemed little chance that a Bush foreign policy would, in any way, resemble the tenets laid out in Blair's Chicago speech. In 2000, Condoleezza Rice published an article in Foreign Affairs, "Promoting the National Interest," which was Kissingerian in its emphasis on national interests and its disdain for "humanitarian intervention" and nation-building. And yet the first piece of advice that Clinton gave Blair after Bush, in effect, was declared President by the Supreme Court was distinctly nonpartisan. "Be his friend," Clinton told Blair at Chequers, the Prime Minister's weekend retreat. "Be his best friend. Be the guy he turns to."

After Blair held his first serious meeting with Bush, at Camp David in February, 2001, he told an aide that Bush was "strong, straightforward, with an underlying seriousness. You know where you are with him. I like him." As Bush said at their press conference, "He put the charm offensive on me." Asked whether they shared some interests, Bush cracked, "Well, we both use Colgate toothpaste."

One morning, Blair and his entourage set off to campaign in the town of Gravesend, east of London. The ostensible aim was to promote the development of industries and infrastructure along the banks of the Thames, but the real reason was to reach the swing votes of the county of Kent. Blair got into the back seat of his car--a bottle-green Jaguar Sovereign--and, along with his press aides, David Hill and Hilary Coffman, and some other assistants, I climbed into a van. After a breakneck, bendy ride to Canary Wharf, we boarded a kind of bateau mouche and embarked on an hour-long journey on the river. All along the way, Blair gave a string of interviews, careful always to repeat key facts about the multibillion-dollar Thames Gateway development project. He repeated the same phrases--"biggest brownfield project in Western Europe," "concern for the environmental questions," etc.--with precision. He had mastered the briefing book.

David Hill stood off to the side and, with an ironic glint of admiration, watched his man at work in front of the cameras and tape recorders.

"You familiarize him, then you wind him up and let him go," he said.

The Blair team disembarked at Gravesend, did a public event on the pier with local pols and businesspeople about the development program, took a walkabout along "the historic High Street" (snap, snap, sound bite, sound bite), and then we hustled back to the waiting vans. In the rush, we almost lost track of Blair's Jaguar.

"Do you remember that episode of 'The West Wing' when Josh and Toby miss the motorcade and they're left behind in Indiana?" Hilary Coffman said. "We can relate."

A couple of minutes later, we arrived at a train that would take us from Gravesend back to Charing Cross Station, very close to Downing Street. There was no special train, not even a reserved car; the Blair crowd remarked on "how non-White House" it all was. Blair took a seat near a window and a few aides squished in next to him, including John Prescott, Blair's deputy P.M. Prescott, who comes from a family of miners, railwaymen, and union officials, attended Ruskin College, Oxford, on scholarship in his late twenties; as a young man, he worked as a steward on a cruise ship, and when he won a seat in the Commons Tory M.P.s like the toff Nicholas Soames used to shout at him, "A whiskey-and-soda for me, Giovanni! And a gin-and-tonic for my friend!" Prescott has a meaty, Old Labour face; he is tough and is a skillful Party enforcer. Once, when Blair angered him, he called him a "fucking Jesus Christ." One of Prescott's main tasks is to serve as arbiter of the dysfunctional partnership between Blair and Gordon Brown. As the train rolled along, I could hear Hill quietly briefing Blair on some upcoming events, at one point saying, "And the message is . . ." Blair took notes on a white legal pad. As the train picked up more passengers, he cheerfully told his security guards to let some in to fill the few empty seats in our part of the car. "As opposed to the right wing, we need all positive messages," Hill was saying. "Clear . . . refined message . . . forward . . ."

The commuters seemed underwhelmed to be in the presence of their Prime Minister. A man carrying the Daily Telegraph sat down, glanced once at Blair, opened his paper, and never stopped reading. A little girl asked her mother, "Mummy, is that Tony Blair?" Sensing an interest, Blair invited her to come over and take a picture with her cell-phone camera. The mother, an Italian immigrant, told Blair that Silvio Berlusconi would never take such a train.

"I imagine not," Blair said.

For much of the hour-long trip into town, I was able to sit near Blair and ask him about Iraq. From almost the day he took office, Blair had been telling visitors to No. 10 that he was appalled by the intelligence reports he was reading on Saddam's intentions and his weapons programs. "I don't understand why the French and others don't understand this," he said in 1997 to Paddy Ashdown, then the leader of the Liberal Democrats. "We cannot let him get away with it."

The Al Qaeda attacks in New York and Washington marked the end of the Bush Administration's hope of running the inward-looking foreign policy envisioned in Rice's Foreign Affairs article. "We are all internationalists now," Blair had said in Chicago, and, as Clinton had advised, Blair quickly became Bush's most steadfast ally, signing on for the military efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq. No other country provided nearly as many troops for the U.S.-led incursions. I asked Blair if he thought the United States could have gone to war in Iraq without Britain, which had given the invasion at least the appearance of an international coalition.

"I don't know," Blair said. "I think the United States, in the end, would do whatever was necessary for its own security. But it was important that we did not leave this up to the United States alone. I also profoundly believe that September 11th was an attack on the free world, not on the United States. It was an attack on America because America is the leading power of the free world. If America hadn't been, and Britain was, it would have been an attack on Britain. Let's not be daft about this. This alliance with America has stood my country in good stead."

Part of Blair's problem is that despite his differences with the Administration over everything from the Kyoto environmental accord to foreign aid, to say nothing of Labour's far more liberal domestic policies, much of the British public now sees his brand of interventionism as indistinguishable from the neoconservatism of the White House "Vulcans." And yet Blair seemed not to mind.

"What I think is interesting is that people can come to the same position from different perspectives," he said. "The idea that our ultimate security lies in the spread of the values of democracy and freedom is an idea I feel very comfortable with as a progressive. Now, that doesn't mean you go and alter every regime in the world that doesn't correspond with those principles. But it does mean that where we have taken those steps to intervene you do have faith in the people--whether it's in Iraq or in Afghanistan or, indeed, in Palestine and the Lebanon--to decide their own future."

Is there in fact much difference between the American neoconservatives and Blair's liberal interventionism?

"I don't spend too much time trying to analyze that," he said. "I just say what I think is right in a situation. And in the end we had to take a decision on Saddam. You could have left him there or you could have removed him, and I thought it was better to remove him. . . . What used to be just a moral cause is now also a cause in our own self-interest, which is why the conservatives and the progressives can unite around it."

Sometimes, I said, it seems as if Blair has more admirers in the United States than at home.

"It's kind of people to be good about me in the United States, but right now I need that here," Blair said. "Iraq has been a very divisive issue. There's no point in disputing that. The most important thing now is to concentrate on the future, though, because it must be the case that in a battle between the Iraqi people--and it's now clear that the Iraqi people want democracy with all the guarantees and rights and freedoms that we take for granted--and a gang of terrorists and insurgents, it's pretty obvious whose side we should be on, even for those people who opposed the original conflict. I think there is a sense now of change spreading across the Middle East. Let's leave aside what the reasons for that are, but what's happening in the Lebanon, the announcement made by the President of Egypt about democratic elections, what's already happened in a country like Afghanistan is amazing after decades and decades of brutal repression.

"Sometimes these issues have to be judged on a long time scale and you have to accept that. I hope and believe that when people look back they will see this as something that brought about change, as something good not only for Iraq and the region but also for our country here."

In the months preceding the war, Blair repeatedly denounced the history and the nature of the Baathist dictatorship, but he built his case for war on a legalistic argument that Saddam had repeatedly defied U.N. resolutions on the possession and development of weapons of mass destruction. After the invasion, when no such weapons were found, Blair was attacked by politicians and public figures across the political spectrum--including in his own Cabinet--for selling the war on the basis of dubious intelligence. Two independent inquiries, the Hutton and Butler reports, cleared Blair of the charge that he had deliberately lied to the British people, but his credibility suffered immeasurably. What happened?

"I don't know," Blair said as the train rolled past the fenced-in back yards of suburban London. "The best that I can go on is what the Iraq Survey Group has found. Two things we do know: Saddam had W.M.D. and we haven't found them."

If he had known that Iraq's weapons program was so diminished, would he have gone to war based on Saddam's "intentions" to build more W.M.D. and on a human-rights case?

"The legal case for war rested on breaches of U.N. resolutions, but in February, 2003, I made a speech in Glasgow where I described the relevance of the nature of the regime," he said. "And the truth is, what the relevance of the nature of the regime did mean was that, one, obviously, any risk of W.M.D. in the hands of a regime such as this was greater than W.M.D. in the hands of a relatively benign regime. And, secondly, it meant that removing that regime was in itself not a bad thing to do. On the contrary, it's a good thing to do. Now, the legal case had to be based on the breaches of U.N. resolutions. That's the distinction, really. Again, contrary to the history of this, I think that, for all of us looking at this, the nature of the regime was a very important context in which that legal case was examined. In terms of the legal case, ah, it was about W.M.D."

Blair squirmed at this line of questioning. He could not, politically or otherwise, bring himself to say that the war was fought on a false premise. "So you are saying no, in other words?" I said.

"In the end, the issue was to do with breaches of U.N. resolutions with respect to W.M.D.," Blair said. "A better way of putting this question is: 'But for September 11th, is this a discussion we would have been having?' And the answer to that is no. What September 11th did was change my thinking fundamentally. I then thought that all those worries I'd had about W.M.D. and proliferation were thrown into sharp relief and I thought, No, the one thing we must make absolutely sure of is that this nexus of repressive states, the development of W.M.D., the development of this type of virulent and extreme form of terrorism--you've got to put a stop to it. What does that mean? It means take the security measures that are necessary. It means sending a signal right across the world that from now on in if you develop this in the face of U.N. resolutions you're going to face trouble. Now, that was the reason for taking on Iraq. It wasn't because I suddenly thought Iraq was going to invade Britain. I didn't. We never put the case on that basis. But the importance of enforcing the international will vis-a-vis W.M.D. was brought home to me by September 11th and therefore the place to start was Iraq, because Iraq was in breach of U.N. resolutions going back a number of years."

Blair paused and then continued, "Now, I personally think that since then there has been an imperfect dialogue with Iran, but at least Europe and America are working together on it. Libya is giving up its W.M.D. The A.Q. Khan network, which was very dangerous indeed, has been effectively shut down. North Korea is an issue, but the world is focussed on it. It's not been allowed to fester. The security reason, for me, for taking the action--and without the security reason you couldn't have taken it simply on human-rights grounds--the security reason was very much linked to my perception that, post-September 11th, the whole game had changed. The balance of risk had changed. If, in the situation previously, the balance of doubt was toward inaction, after September 11th the balance of doubt, always, for me, fell with action."

According to Peter Stothard's book "Thirty Days," one of several informative accounts of the debate over Iraq in Britain, less than a week before the Commons voted on the war Blair told one of his aides, Sally Morgan, "What amazes me is how many people are happy for Saddam to stay. They ask why don't we get rid of Mugabe, why not the Burmese lot. Yes, let's get rid of them all. I don't because I can't, but when you can you should."

That remark, and others like it, showed Blair's increasing disenchantment with the left. Even though, in Clintonian fashion, he had moved his party to the center, he never imagined in 1997 that so many readers of the Guardian, say, would abandon him. (Similarly, many readers of the Guardian would never have imagined that a Labour Prime Minister would tighten up on civil liberties or court Rupert Murdoch, the uber-purveyor of right-leaning media, as assiduously as Blair has.)

When I asked Blair about his exasperated remark at Downing Street, he said, "The biggest scandal in progressive politics is that you do not have people with placards out in the street on North Korea. I mean, that is a disgusting regime. The people are kept in a form of slavery, twenty-three million of them, and no one protests! You get a hundred thousand people out in the street of just about any European capital to protest about America, which, for all its faults, is a free country!

"The left has two impulses, which come into conflict with each other, though both of those impulses are perfectly good," Blair went on. "One is peace, and the other is intervention to help people. Peace is great. But, if you're living with a tyrannical regime, you don't have much peace."

I asked Blair about all the mistakes and even disasters that followed the fall of Saddam: the American failure to anticipate mass looting, the insurgency, the unending casualties, the torture at Abu Ghraib prison.

"On that I take a slightly heretical view," he said. "I think that when anything like that happens it's ghastly and terrible and should be condemned immediately and dealt with. But I also think that people are cleverer in the Middle East, in Iraq and places like that, than we often give them credit for. And what they see is something terrible happening and the U.S. acting on it, the U.S. politicians under pressure, the U.S. soldiers responsible being prosecuted. I think people say these things happen, but the difference between a democracy and a dictatorship is that in a democracy when something terrible happens someone is held to account and in a dictatorship they're not.

"I had meeting after meeting about postwar planning, but all the postwar planning was really on the basis of humanitarian collapse," Blair continued. "I mean, that's what one thought was going to happen. That's what we were warned about." Only if the coalition successfully provided Iraq with the rudiments of a working, secure democracy, Blair said, would the insurgents fade. "Because how can they then turn toward the people in the Middle East and elsewhere, to Muslims the world over, and say, 'This is the terrible Satan exploiting and demeaning our people and preventing us from having our religion,' when people in Iraq are actually freer to worship in Iraq than they were and they've got a democracy!"

Blair's own frustrations were clear. The absence of W.M.D. in Iraq had left him feeling unmoored, evasive. I thought of McEwan's Perowne and his attempt to get behind Blair's earnest mask in the days before the war:

Perowne wonders if such moments, stabs of cold panicky doubt, are an increasing part of the Prime Minister's days, or nights. There might not be a second UN resolution. The next weapons inspectors' report could also be inconclusive. The Iraqis might use biological weapons against the invasion force. Or, as one former inspector keeps insisting, there might no longer be any weapons of mass destruction at all. There's talk of famine and three million refugees, and they're already preparing the reception camps in Syria and Iran. The UN is predicting hundreds of thousands of Iraqi deaths. There could be revenge attacks on London. And still the Americans remain vague about their post-war plans. Perhaps they have none. In all, Saddam could be overthrown at too high a cost. It's a future no one can read. Government ministers speak up loyally, various newspapers back the war, there's a fair degree of anxious support in the country along with the dissent, but no one really doubts that in Britain one man alone is driving the matter forward. Night sweats, hideous dreams, the wild, lurching fantasies of sleeplessness?

Now, with the main fighting likely over, it remains unclear how history will judge Blair. Conor Gearty, a human-rights advocate who works in the same law chambers as Cherie Blair, told me that he was against the war and Blair's conduct of it, and yet he will sometimes ask his students at the London School of Economics if they can imagine Blair and Bush one day being declared heroes, for having opened the way to a democratizing wave in the authoritarian states of the Middle East. "My students just laugh," Gearty said. "But I admit it's not inconceivable."

In all the best accounts of Blair's diplomacy--Stothard's "Thirty Days," Peter Riddell's "Hug Them Close," John Kampfner's "Blair's Wars," the Hutton and Butler reports, and the BBC documentary "Iraq, Tony & the Truth"--the Prime Minister is convinced that Saddam is in violation of U.N. resolutions. He is not deliberately misleading Britain, but, at the same time, he appears too willing to accept unsubstantiated intelligence as absolute and to advertise that evidence as fact to the public. "At the heart of the problem was a culture clash: between the worlds of John le Carre's George Smiley and 'The West Wing,' between cautious words, caveats, and nuances of the Joint Intelligence Committee and the megaphone communications of 'spin doctors' and the twenty-four-hour news cycle," Peter Riddell, a columnist for the London Times, wrote. "The more public intelligence assessments are, the more that any qualifications and uncertainties disappear. Tony Blair and the Government were certainly at fault in not highlighting the doubts."

Even some of Blair's closest advisers appeared to know that they were playing a reckless game in preparing a dubious dossier for the leadership and for public consumption. In an e-mail that was sent in September, 2002--and came out a year later--Jonathan Powell, Blair's chief of staff, told the chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee, John Scarlett, that while the "dossier is good and convincing for those who are prepared to be convinced . . . the document does nothing to demonstrate a threat, let alone an imminent threat, from Saddam."

Peter Oborne, the political editor of the conservative Spectator, told me he thought that Blair could be a "broken" man as a result of the loss of trust. "This all matters because of a hundred thousand Iraqis killed, Abu Ghraib, a shameful thing for which no one was sacked," Oborne, who has just published a book on lying in British politics, said. "The readiness to break international law, to lie to voters and the international community, to ignore proper process, the sheer arrogance. It is the most evil and destructive and barbaric act of my lifetime and it has shaken my faith. Those W.M.D. did not exist and we were told that they did. . . . As a result, the entire political system has suffered a catastrophic collapse in trust in Blair himself."

Although some historians might well agree with Blair that the destruction of the Baathist regime--despite the casualties, the terrible postwar planning, Abu Ghraib--prevented further violence by Saddam and his sons and led to regional change, the antipathy to, even hatred of, George Bush among some Britons is so intense that Blair's most unforgivable sin seems to be his second-banana role in the Anglo-American alliance. This impression was only exacerbated when, in early 2003, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld told the press that the coalition could live without British military help, or when White House aides such as Scooter Libby, Vice-President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, openly mocked Blair's calls for a (doomed) second resolution in the Security Council. "Oh, dear, we'd better not do that or we might upset the Prime Minister," Libby said, according to Philip Stephens's biography of Blair.

The British have not soured on the United States so much as they have come to long for a Prime Minister who will remove the taint of subservience from the relationship. Last year, English audiences went to see "Love Actually," a lighter-than-air comedy starring Hugh Grant as an improbably handsome, love-starved Prime Minister. People broke out in applause during a scene in which Prime Minister Grant, during a joint press conference at No. 10 with a libidinous (Clintonian), cowboy (Bushian) American President, played by Billy Bob Thornton, says that the relationship is no longer special. "I fear that this has become a bad relationship," he says, "a relationship based on the President taking exactly what he wants and casually ignoring all those things that really matter to Britain." And yet those applauding audiences knew that the "Love Actually" moment was as improbable under Tony Blair, or any modern Prime Minister, as Don Corleone's ascension to the papacy. Around the Downing Street offices, aides are quite sure that Blair will win, but they do not pretend that the Bush-Blair quandary has fully receded. "The problem is Bush," one of his senior advisers told me. "The monumental obligation to Bush has brought out latent anti-Americanism. People are concerned about trust and Blair's judgment. The fact that he has done the wrong thing on Iraq means they have grave concerns about his judgment."

In order to win back the left, the official said, Blair has to show that he is pushing the Americans to act more forcefully on the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, on aid to Africa, on climate change. "It doesn't balance Iraq," the official said, "but if you are a voter who needs permission to vote for Blair, even grudgingly, you can say at least he is O.K. on the Palestinian question or public service." For conservative voters, Blair needs to show that he is active in what another official called "Rudy Giuliani politics": getting rid of public drunkenness, eradicating annoyances like graffiti, getting control of discipline in the schools. The leaders of the Conservative Party concede that they can win only through apathy and protest votes; their over-all voice in this campaign, one Tory M.P. told me, is "more Dole in '96 than Bush in 2000, more bleak than hopeful." And that should be telling. Simon Jenkins, who writes a column in the Times that regularly attacks Blair, told me that, as long as the economy stays at its current level, "people feel quite good. And they are prepared to give credit to the smiling chap at the top. There is no one else but Tony Blair."

President Bush has not paid much of a price for the mistakes that accompanied the Iraq war. The Abu Ghraib torture scandal outraged world opinion, yet Rumsfeld had to endure little more than a day's questioning on Capitol Hill. Recent government investigations showed the entire intelligence bureaucracy to have been utterly mistaken on the question of Iraqi W.M.D. But there were no resignations of consequence--George Tenet stepped down as C.I.A. chief, but then was awarded the Medal of Freedom. During the Presidential debates, Bush could not name a major mistake that he had made in his first term; the words "Abu Ghraib" were never uttered in the debates by either Bush or John Kerry.

Blair has endured far more criticism, but he, too, may pay a minimal price at the polls. Recently, I was watching him on a television chat show called "The Wright Stuff," in which an unctuous host named Matthew Wright put the Prime Minister through yet another hour of the masochism campaign. (He called him Tony no fewer than twenty times.) At one point, Wright ran a tape for Blair of voters telling the camera what they wanted from him:

Woman: I would like Tony Blair to get rid of bureaucracy in hospitals, so that nurses could actually get on with their job. . . .Man: I want equal rights for fathers.Young Woman: I want Tony Blair to improve schools by giving teachers more power.Man: I want smoking banned in public.Woman: I want university fees abolished.Woman: I want honesty from the government.Man: I want regional government for the Northwest.Man: I want immigrants not to be treated like criminals.Young Woman: I want Tony Blair to introduce congestion charges all over Britain, so it will encourage people to use public transport.Young Woman in Head Scarf: I want Tony Blair to stop doing what the American government says, and more what the British public thinks.Woman: I want Tony Blair to stop putting pressure on moms like me to go back to work.

"It's a long list," Blair said. But he could only be pleased. Only one person, the woman wearing a hijab, said a word about foreign policy; everything else was domestic bread and butter.

Blair is concentrating on winning his way back into the affections of the British public inch by inch. He will take any meeting, it seems. A reception for the British Society of Magazine Editors at Downing Street did not appear to feature the opinion magazines--The New Statesman, The Spectator, or Prospect. It cast a wider net: CosmoGirl!, Waitrose Food Illustrated, Motorcycle News, fashion magazines, travel magazines. I sat next to the editor of Spirit & Destiny. I asked her what was in her magazine and she said, "Alternate life style, health, and just a hint of witchcraft." Blair opened the meeting by saying, "A special thanks to the lady from Flower Arranger magazine who brought some flowers for Cherie."

Some of the questions were serious--about human rights in China, European alliances, the campaign--but there were more on things like "the BikeSafe campaign" and, more than once, the Prime Minister's opinion of Turkey Twizzlers. Then someone asked Blair whom he would choose as Chancellor of the Exchequer "if Gordon Brown were to be hit by a bus."

Blair is unshakable, and yet he paused, as if to catch his breath. "Well, that would be a really good one to speculate on," he said. "Actually, I saw him this morning and he is in very good health."

When the group of editors had fairly exhausted their cache of questions, something in Blair clicked--"Be a good host! Show them around!"--and, with a tinge of been-there-before irony, he gave the briefest of No. 10 house tours.

"Right," he said. "Well, we're in the state dining room." He pointed to one side of the room. "There's the silver. It's best to leave that alone." Then, pointing to a huge painting over his shoulder. "There's a portrait of King George. When he was around, we still had America."

Blair went back downstairs to his den. When I asked him what, if any, criticisms he had of the Bush White House, he was, as ever, careful, even indulgent. He said that the Administration's policies on everything from the environment to aid for Africa were not so much right wing as they were victims of bad press.

"The key is to understand where the Administration is coming from," he said. "The Administration is not saying Africa is unimportant. They are hardheaded about the need for good governance, anti-corruption, conflict resolution, as well as debt relief. Contrary again to what people think, they do accept the importance of tackling climate change and moving beyond the carbon-based economy. But they are going to be very hardheaded about how you do that and how it affects economic growth and living standards.

"It's a question of persuasion and also understanding where America is coming from, rather than reading about where the Americans are coming from, because my experience is often completely different."

Blair's delicacy about the United States is such that he seemed to dismiss the importance of anti-Americanism in Britain, especially in the universities and among the political elites and the media.

"It's a fashion!" he said. "For people to run down the relationship, to say Britain gets nothing out of it, to say I'm a poodle of America and all that stuff. . . . If you listen to any of the people doing chat shows or any of the rest of it, there's an underlying culture of mocking the relationship, saying it doesn't matter, et cetera. That's just the way it is. But if you are taking the long view and say, 'What's really in the interests of the country,' you just have to stand up and properly explain to people why the relationship is important and that we do share certain values.

"There's a part of the media in Britain that is anti-European, there's part that's anti-American, and there's a part that is anti both alliances," he continued. "Which is a bizarre position to try to put yourself in with Britain in the early part of the twenty-first century, as opposed to Britain at the end of the nineteenth century. . . . Sometimes you have to bring people back to the fundamentals and say, O.K., so you don't like this or that aspect of a policy. Are we really saying you want to give up this relationship with Europe or America? Of course not. It would be daft. No country in its senses would do that in this day and age, when, unless you are the size of China, India, or the U.S., the very thing that gives you purchase on all sorts of international situations which have a direct bearing on the interests of your country are these alliances. These are the two pillars of British foreign policy, and we'd be crackers to give up either."

Last spring, Blair was thinking about whether to stand again. In 1994, he and Gordon Brown had a private dinner at a restaurant called Granita, in the North London neighborhood of Islington--an event that is the folkloric mystery of contemporary British politics. Both Blair and Brown have their designated leakers; the Brown leakers contend that Blair promised Brown that, after two terms as Prime Minister (or, alternatively, ten years as Party leader), Blair would step aside for Brown; and, in the meantime, Brown would have unprecedented authority in the broad realm of domestic policy. Blair told me, as he has told everyone else, that "you don't make deals" with such positions, and no such deal was made at Granita. What is clear is that Blair saw what had happened to Thatcher, who had once said that she would go "on and on"--a bit of presumption that was laid low when her own party threw her out and then replaced her with John Major. And so Blair decided to run for a third term but, unlike Thatcher, promised that he would not attempt a fourth.

"Nobody could go on for four terms," he said. "The country wouldn't want it."

In the past couple of weeks, Brown and Blair have again closed ranks, appearing together on the campaign trail and even in a gauzy ad put together by Anthony Minghella, the director of "The English Patient." Brown's televised support has helped Blair widen his lead.

In moments of crisis, the press often reaches for a bit of physical description to match what it imagines must be Blair's exhaustion or despair. He is "ashen-faced." His "hair is thinning." He has lost weight. I didn't see any of that. He still looks preposterously youthful, despite episodes in the past year of cardiac arrhythmia. Yet Blair did one the favor of denying that he was always in absolute command even as the polls were breaking his way.

The job "is utterly relentless," he said. "You are dealing with a multiplicity of issues the whole time. And the decision-making process stops with you. That's an amazing thing--when every decision stops with you. How do you make sense of that? It's by recognizing that it's a privilege to do it, that you can do it only for a limited time, and that the only way to make the most of it is to keep your nerve, do what you think is right, recognize you won't please all of the people all of the time--in fact, pleasing some of the people some of the time is quite an achievement. And, whatever judgments are made at the time, history may take another view."