At the midway point in the British general election campaign, opinion poll after opinion poll tells the same story: prime minister Tony Blair and his Labour Party will be returned on May 5th for a historic third term in office. Out of 11 samplings since April 7th, according to reputable opinion pollsters, Labour has scored an average of 39.4 per centage points. The Conservatives come in a distant second with an average rating of 32.2 and the Liberal Democrats a respectable third at 21.5.
If these preferences were repeated on election day, Britain's first-past-the-post system would give Mr Blair a majority of 142 seats in the House of Commons (down nine from when parliament was dissolved), the Conservatives would have gained six seats and the Lib Dems four. Yesterday, affirmation of the zeitgeist came in the form of endorsements from Rupert Murdoch's cheerleading Sun newspaper (which sells some 3.2 million copies a day) and the television chef and Norwich City football club director, Delia Smith. Both said they were backing Labour.
Three term in a row governments are intrinsically dangerous for any democracy. It is simply not a good thing for the same people to have their hands on the levers of power, and for their friends - real and presumed - to have access to them, for the best part of 15 years, which is what will happen if Mr Blair wins. It is no small factor in his favour that the main opposition party has found itself unable to recover fully from the effects of its longest period in office in the last century. It is to the current leader Michael Howard's credit that he is at least seen as a credible opponent to Mr Blair, if not a worthy alternative as prime minister in the eyes of the electorate.
Mr Howard has a mountain to climb and while it is the electorate who will decide on May 5th, the scale of the challenge seems insurmountable. The challenge for Mr Blair is to avoid making mistakes. The Liberal Democrats must make the voters think they, and not the Conservatives, are the alternative to Labour.
Viewed from this island (interested and concerned but not parish pump close), what is remarkable so far in the campaign is the degree to which key issues are not producing policy chasms between the two main parties. Differences over the economy, public services and taxation are not such that they are causing voters to change sides. The war in Iraq - pre-campaign, assumed to be Mr Blair's Achilles' heel - has been sidelined as an issue, the preserve of single issue candidates. Europe, at the heart of which Mr Blair said in 1997 he would place Britain, is barely mentioned. The matter of the EU's proposed constitution is left, apparently, to the French electorate.
Mr Blair's first term was dominated, among other things, by the initiation of reform in public services. His second term was blighted by Iraq. If he wins his third term, which he is determined to work through until the moment he calls the next election, will it be dominated by further reform, as Mr Blair wants, or positioning for the succession?