UK: Opinion After the last British election, the nickname-crazed George W Bush took to calling Tony Blair "Landslide". He might have to come up with an alternative term of endearment by the time this Thursday's results are in, writes Mark Steyn.
Readers may recall that last year I predicted Mr Bush would be re-elected and bet my column in these pages on the result. Somewhere along the way I also threw in that all three doughty warriors of the Anglosphere - Bush, Blair and Australia's John Howard - would be returned to office. Two down, and on Thursday Triumphant Tony will win - or, to be punctiliously parliamentary, the Labour Party will win. But it's the ever wider chasm between the two - between the Colossus of Mesopotamia and a party base that's either antipathetic or hostile to him - that's given this election its principal dynamic.
John Howard was supposed to be in trouble in last autumn's election, but he won big. Bush was supposed to be in trouble up until about 7pm Eastern Time on election day.
Across the Atlantic, if you made the mistake of watching RTÉ or the BBC you no doubt went to bed confidently expecting to wake up in the bright new dawn of the Kerry era.
Instead, Bush also won big. Iraq, we'd been assured by all the commentators, was an electoral liability, and so it was - for the opposition parties. It's not just that the US Democrats and the Australian Labor Party lost, but it's the manner of the loss. Eight months ago, Mark Latham was the great white hope of the Australian left. At the beginning of this year, he quit on health grounds.
As the Sydney Morning Herald's Tony Stephens reported, not entirely felicitously: "He had said of John Howard at Labor's campaign launch only 16 weeks ago: 'I'm ready to lead. He's ready to leave." He had said that he had fire in his belly and that, at 43, he was in the prime of his life. Now he is leaving while Howard continues to lead. The fire in his belly has been doused by his pancreas, the large organ behind his belly." But don't worry,
Howard's re-election was nothing to do with Iraq or terrorism. That's what the media told us, though, if he'd lost, they'd have splashed it all over page one as a shattering blow to Bush instead of tucking it at the foot of page 29 ("Obscure regional figure of no wider significance wins predictable victory"). As for the Democrats, they took refuge in the conventional wisdom that "the American people don't change commanders-in-chief in the middle of a war". This conventional wisdom dates all the way back to, oh, 10.37pm on election night. Recent historical precedent suggests wartime presidencies tend to end before hostilities do - ask Johnson and Truman re Vietnam and Korea.
In Britain, on the other hand, the Bush administration figured it was a win/win scenario. Their order of preferences ran: 1) A Blair victory. Ol' Landslide was the president's key sidekick in the coalition of the willing. And, even though Iraq hasn't figured much in this campaign, a defeat for Blair would be seen as a Spain-like repudiation of the war.
2) A Tory victory. On the other hand, even if Blair goes down, he'd lose to the Conservative Party. And, though British Tories are not entirely comfortable with the evangelical cowboy aspects of this administration, a Conservative in Downing Street is still better news for Washington than that wacky anti-war Socialist who took over in Madrid.
Alas, Washington's likely to wind up with an unsatisfactory third option: a Labour victory, but with a weakened Blair. Unlike US presidents, British prime ministers aren't elected to "terms". The parliament the voters choose on Thursday can sit for five years, but the prime minister could be gone in one or two or three. And the main consequence of this election is that Blair's been weakened and Brown's been strengthened, and the latter is likely to take over sooner rather than later.
Blair's is a cautionary tale. Unlike George W Bush, who wanted to topple Saddam because he wanted to topple Saddam, the prime minister felt obliged to square it with his deference to progressive hooey like "international law", so he framed the case against Saddam in technical legalistic terms such as the threat Iraq presented to British bases in Cyprus, only 45 minutes away as the WMD fly. The narrow legalisms proved to be untrue, and Blair has paid a much higher price for that than Bush has.
There are millions of Americans who take the view that there's no such thing as a bad reason to whack Saddam. So, even in the worst slough of his 2004 media treatment, Bush still had the support of his party, congress and half the American people.
Blair by contrast, went to war with tepid support from his party, parliament and people, and, despite winning said war, has managed to lose support with all three groups in the two years since. In particular, his party - viscerally anti-war and mostly anti-American - loathes him. The most tortured moment in political interviews is when some Labour candidate is asked whether he or she supports Blair and after a long pause replies through tight lips, as Yasmin Qureshi did this week, "He is the leader of the party at the moment." That's not exactly what they call on Broadway a money review. Blair may be a global colossus but back home he's the lonesomest gal in town. The problem with the war on terror is that once it was framed as an existential struggle for western civilization it was all too predictable that the left would act as it did the last time we had one of those, the Cold War: they'd do their best to lose it.
The prime minister will win the election, but he's lost the campaign, and in the end that will prove more decisive.