THE BRITISH have a joke about the curse of Hello!, a glossy magazine that specializes in sucking up to international celebrities. No sooner does the latest issue hit newsstands than the “perfect marriage” falls apart or the “brilliant businessman” turns out to be a serial embezzler. Perhaps Americans should start joking about the curse of the New York Times Magazine. Ever since it ran a particularly oily profile of Tony Blair, the man who used to be able to walk on water has been falling flat on his face.
Everything ought to be going swimmingly for Blair. He has just become a father for the fourth time, the first sitting prime minister to sire a child in 152 years. The British economy is humming, with an American combination of low inflation, low unemployment, and technological innovation. And the European question — the San Andreas fault of modern British politics — continues to do more harm to the Conservative party than to Blair’s androids.
And yet Blair is suddenly in serious trouble. A June 7 speech to the Women’s Institute that was meant to reintroduce the prime minister to his adoring public, refreshed after two weeks’ paternity leave, collapsed in chaos. The Women’s Institute is the very embodiment of the Middle England that Blair wooed away from the Conservatives in 1997, yet its members booed, clapped disruptively, and even walked out in disgust at the prime minister’s blatant attempt to turn their annual meeting into a political rally. Having received nothing but adulation from the public for the past three years, Blair looked on in utter confusion, grinning nervously.
Blair’s comeuppance came after a disastrous fortnight for his party. No sooner had the prime minister disappeared to fulfill his paternal duties than his dour chancellor, Gordon Brown, decided to show off a Labour tactic that had not been seen in years: class warfare. Brown chose to highlight a story about Laura Spence, a student from a comprehensive school, which like an American public school doesn’t have a competitive admissions process. Spence had been turned down for a place at Oxford but awarded a scholarship at Harvard. For the Edinburgh-educated Brown this provided incontrovertible evidence that Oxford is a bastion of class privilege, a place where port-sodden fogies in tweed jackets and mortarboards spend their time conspiring to do down the working classes.
Brown’s broadside might have been a little more successful if he had done his homework. Laura Spence lost out not to little Lord Fauntleroy but to students with similar backgrounds. (The man who directs admissions at the college she applied to is, it turns out, quite devoted to recruiting more pupils from the state sector.) And Spence’s course at Harvard (biochemistry) is much less selective than the one that she was turned down for at Oxford (pre-med).
Brown’s argument also reminded the public of two rather unfortunate facts. The first is that state-school pupils find it so difficult to get into Oxbridge because past Labour governments — and their fellow travelers in the education establishment — have conducted a relentless war on learning standards, abolishing the grammar schools, which, thanks to competitive admissions, were able to focus on getting lads-o-parts into Oxbridge. The second is that the Labour party used to be synonymous with the “politics of envy” that gave Britain a top tax rate of 98 percent, the worst industrial relations record in Europe, and a sclerotic economy.
The Oxbridge debate had another unfortunate consequence for New Labour. It undermined the party’s claim that its lawmakers are mere tribunes of the people, classless, selfless, and motivated by nothing other than the common good. Nobody was louder in her condemnation of Oxford’s privileged ways than Baroness Jay, the leader of the House of Lords. But it turns out that the baroness not only went to private school and Oxford herself, she also did her best to make sure that her children followed in her footsteps.
Her credentials as head of the new “classless” House of Lords are entirely suspect: The daughter of a Labour prime minister, James Callaghan, she married the son of another Labour grandee, Douglas Jay. Although her husband was merely a journalist, Daddy Callaghan, in a major scandal, made him British ambassador to the United States. Thus, Baroness Jay, future defender of the people, enjoyed a diverting few years in Washington, as the wife of an ambassador and, incidentally, lover of Carl Bernstein.
One reason for Labour’s problems is a good old battle for power. Gordon Brown has always coveted Tony’s crown, and, in launching a jihad against exclusive private schools and Oxford, he was also venting his resentments against the Oxford-educated Blair. Brown and Blair head the two wings of New Labour. They have their own sets of courtiers, their own spin doctors, and, most important, their own visions of Labour’s future, with Brown’s well to the left of Blair’s. The Tory party was destroyed by a conflict between Lady Thatcher and other Tory grandees, notably Geoffrey Howe and Nigel Lawson. The Oxford spat was yet another reminder that New Labour could suffer a similar fate.
There are deeper problems, too. After the longest honeymoon in British history, the people are beginning to get restive. The Labour party has failed to deliver the revolutionary improvement in public services that it promised while in opposition. State schools remain hopelessly inferior to their private equivalents — a fact that Brown unwittingly advertised in his rant against Oxford. The National Health Service hobbles from crisis to crisis. The London Underground is a foretaste of hell. And the sorts of urban blight that have visibly diminished in New York City — aggressive beggars, wanton littering, beer-belching yobs — are visibly flourishing in London.
New Labour’s bigger plans are also falling apart. Blair had hoped that constitutional reform would be his government’s equivalent of privatization — the policy that would provide the government with a radical edge and an expanding constituency. But so far it has been a dreadful flop.
It has flopped partly because Blair has failed to grasp the elementary point that giving away power means that you no longer have it yourself. After supporting the creation of a mayoralty of London, he was very upset when it became clear one of his cronies wouldn’t be elected to it. He did everything short of fixing the election to prevent Ken Livingstone, an old leftist, from winning. (Red Ken is now installed in office.) But Labour has flopped, more fundamentally, because it has spawned parliaments in Scotland and Wales, populated by well-paid windbags, that have singularly failed to capture the public imagination. One radio station discovered that the audience for its program about the Welsh parliament had shrunk to zero.
On top of all that, the new Millennium Dome, a gigantic theme park-cum-national monument in Greenwich, has turned out to be a money-eating disaster. Blair boasted that the dome was the physical expression of the spirit of New Labour — sleek, modern, yet inclusive. We were meant to marvel at the grandeur and ambition of the thing, yet at the same time rush to take our kids there for an amusing day out. But it is a commercial flop, kept alive only by huge infusions of public money. And, with its kitsch contents, shoddy displays, and underlying assumption that the purpose of a thousand years of British history was to produce New Labour, it has come to symbolize the hollowness of the current administration.
This is not to say that Blair is likely to lose the next election. The Tories are still in deep trouble, their last few years in power a byword for national calamity and their current leader, William Hague, widely regarded as an aging boy wonder who spent his youth speaking at Tory party conferences rather than chasing girls. Blair has one of the world’s most formidable media-management machines at his disposal. And there is still a great swath of issues — most notably fox hunting, an anti-elitist issue that is very powerful among Labour’s supporters — that Blair can use not just to motivate the Labour heartland but also to mobilize the metropolitan swing voters who put him into power.
Yet something is happening in Britain, albeit gradually. Blair is losing his air of invincibility. And his party is increasingly looking like a bunch of chancers who, having ditched their ideology, are held together by nothing more than the baubles of office.
Adrian Wooldridge is the author, with John Micklethwait, of A Future Perfect: The Challenge and Hidden Promise of Globalization (Crown Business). He is a Washington-based correspondent for the Economist.
