Now reveal yourself
THE campaign was numbingly dull despite -- or perhaps because of -- its unusual six-week length. Most of the arguments of the main parties had already been heard, many times, during the preceding months. Not the yogic fliers of Natural Law, nor the Monster Raving Loonies, nor even the real raving loonies of Sir James Goldsmith's Referendum Party proved able to bring colour to Britain's election campaign. And in a way the final joke that the campaign played was that it produced the result that had seemed likely right from the start: a Labour landslide.So was it all a waste of time? At the start as at the finish, voters were tired of the Tories, of their divisions over Europe, incompetence over mad-cow disease, corruption or just their boring familiarity. They felt that Labour offered an alternative that was no longer a dangerously dreamy socialist experiment, nor a plan to hand power to trade-union leaders. Many Britons have, as the French like to put it, their hearts on the left but their wallets on the right, and this was the first election for 18 years in which the wallets felt able to let the hearts make the choice.
All that said, the campaign was more revealing than the result makes it appear. What it revealed was that voters' enthusiasm for kicking the Tories out was not matched by much enthusiasm for bringing Labour in. As the weeks went by, even once-strong supporters of Mr Blair began to have doubts, although voters still evidently considered him the least bad choice. For he disparaged the Tories' record with extraordinary moral fervour, but then proceeded to propose very few changes. Such calculated dishonesty does, at least, leave his new government with a fairly clean sheet of paper. What might he write upon it?
The opportunity
A landslide without enthusiasm is a landslide nevertheless. And the significance of the result is the great power it will place in the hands of Mr Blair and his closest colleagues.
If he is to be the strong, even radical leader that he claims to want to be, the most immediate use of that power should lie in the appointment of a resolute cabinet rather than the muddled cabinet-in-waiting that was elected last year by the party and is stipulated by Labour tradition. The second use of that power, by his likely chancellor of the exchequer, Gordon Brown, should be to reimpose an official grip on the economy without thought of special interests or electoral pay-offs. Either interest rates must be raised, or taxes increased, or some combination of the two, in order to moderate the economy's growth, but with minimal distortion of private decisions. The temptation to meddle amid a quick July budget will be great. A powerful government should be able to avoid it.
In the longer term, Mr Blair's new power gives him a great opportunity in two main areas. In constitutional reform, it could enable him to stop trimming his ideas to catch the electoral winds. In proposing legislation to set up parliaments for Scotland and Wales, due to be put to a referendum this autumn; in moving quickly ahead with incorporation of the European Convention on Human Rights; in contemplating electoral reform or true (rather than cosmetic) reform of the House of Lords: in all these areas he can now do what a genuinely radical leader would do, namely lead public opinion rather than follow it. The same point holds on the reform of the welfare state, whether for health, social security, education or pensions. In place of his recent timid, disparage-the-Tories-but-give-nothing-away approach he has the chance to stride on to genuinely new ground, leaving behind the old Labour producer interests and nanny-state mentality that have so bedevilled the party in the past.
The risk
Yet would the real Tony Blair be that radical, ground-breaking, opinion-leading prime minister? He could be. But there are risks that he might not. These arise from this landslide, from Mr Blair himself and from the challenge of government.
The landslide risk applies most strongly to constitutional and welfare reform. Although his new power makes change possible, it could also make it seem less necessary or less desirable. Less necessary, in welfare's case, because Labour was elected without having had to propose change. Less desirable, for both, because constitutional reform reduces central government's power and welfare reform reduces its patronage.
The Blair risk is the danger that he, like Bill Clinton in 1993, could prove obsessed with symbols rather than with policy -- the right gender balance in the cabinet; an ex-businessman to run the Downing Street think-tank; a ban on fox-hunting to look compassionate and modern. Worryingly, Mr Blair's campaign focused more on bulldogs and the colour purple than on the substance of government.
The government risk is one that applies to all new cabinets, not just to Labour. When Harold Macmillan, Tory prime minister in 1957-63, was asked what were his greatest challenges in office he replied: "Events, dear boy, events." How will Mr Blair respond to events? To difficult negotiations in Europe, to trouble after the handover of Hong Kong, to currency volatility, or to strikes by public-sector unions? Might his reactions show him to be a compromiser, a populist, a serial election-campaigner? Or will they show him to be a great prime minister? Britain is waiting to find out.
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