YES, SEX, PLEASE, WE’RE BRITISH

Britain is the one place on earth where right-wingers have established a reputation for ribald lubriciousness, while left-wingers have become known for prissy puritanism. So maybe it would be fitting if the most formidable right-winger of them all were indeed fond of the politician who will probably lead the Labour party into power for the first time since 1979.

But in the end, I think Johnson’s theory signifies nothing more than that the British conservatives have sex on the brain. The Tory party has entered the current campaign, which concludes in an election on May 1, pretty much as it has conducted itself during the five years since the last parliamentary election — hell-bent on duplicating on a nationwide scale Teddy Kennedy’s feats in his best days. Scarcely a season has gone by without one Tory member of Parliament or another found either dallying with a teenager; in embarrassing or fatal autoerotic positions; sleeping with colleagues in foreign hotel rooms; or showing up in compromising passages in the diaries of men and women they should have avoided.

In the initial weeks of the campaign, the chairman of the Scottish Conservative party resigned over what was reported to have been a homosexual affair with a researcher. A member of Parliament named Allan Stewart resigned over an extramarital heterosexual affair. His colleague Jerry Hayes resigned when his teenage love letters to a male friend were obtained by a publicist and sold for profit. Yet another member, Piers Merchant, was photographed in a park with his hand up the miniskirt of nightclub hostess Anna Cox. Cox is estimated to have earned about $ 50,000 for her part in revealing the affair. Merchant responded by very publicly reconciling with his wife, kissing her passionately in front of a bank of cameras.

Merchant is joining a bevy of confessed adulterers running for reelection on the Tory platform. They include David Mellor, whose dalliance with a young woman forced his resignation from the cabinet a few years ago, and Sir Alan Clark, whose bestselling diaries described simultaneous escapades with a mother and her two daughters known, in the diaries as “the coven.” The husband and father of “the coven” once threatened to horsewhip Sir Alan, and now he has flown up from South Africa to campaign against him. But it won’t help. Clark will win.

This appalling behavior is so pervasive, it seemed at first blush that there might be an ideological reason for it. The Sunday Telegraph’s Christopher Booker has found one. He argues that since Parliament has signed so many of its powers over to the Brussels bureaucracy that runs the European Union, members have nothing left to do but misbehave. “Is it then surprising that these same MPs drink themselves to death in lonely hotel rooms,” Booker writes, “or engage in fatal auto-erotic acts with oranges, when they no longer have any proper self-respecting role?”

But that’s pushing it, even for a Euroskeptic like me. Which leaves the question: What is going on in British politics?

There is a more superficially plausible explanation for the Tory sex obsession that has to do with Britain’s class structure: Call it “the return of the Cavaliers.”

Peregrine Worsthorne, the British columnist who is the voice of the aristocracy, complained in the 1980s that when the Thatcherites took over the Tory party, they banished the “rumbustious, Falstaffian, devil-may-care” ethos of upper-class Toryism and replaced it with middle-class morality based on “thrift, sobriety, and work.” Now that the Thatcherites have been shoved off to the angry periphery of the Conservative party, perhaps the older brand of Toryism has reasserted itself.

Auberon Waugh, the son of Evelyn and the other great voice of the reactionary upper classes (I mean that in the best sense), has sided with adulterers like Piers Merchant on the grounds that they represent a blow against the middle-class morality of the tabloids and Tory prime minister John Major. (Waugh did object to the way Merchant publicly reconciled with his wife, arguing that he should not have French-kissed her in public.) Maybe, having been in office for 18 years now, the Tory party has assumed the characteristics of an entitled aristocracy, with all the corrosive decadence that implies.

Those of you who attended a decent high school will remember that back in the 17th century, the aristocratic Cavaliers (said to be “wrong but wromantic” in the great British satire 1066 and All That) took on Oliver Cromwell and his Puritan Roundheads (“right but repulsive”). As the Tories seem to be turning themselves into Cavaliers, the Labour party leaders seem to be turning themselves into Roundheads — prudish, socially conservative, judgmental.

It’s not only that Blair has admitted to spanking his kids, an incredible deviation from Labour party thinking (and always a front-burner issue in England, for reasons I refuse to speculate upon). But even more surprising, Blair is deeply and publicly religious, and not in a let-us-spend-more-money- on-the-welfare-state Church-of-England style either. He believes in real religion, complete with sin, virtue and vice, and tough moral codes. While at Cambridge, Blair fell in with a group of theologians and for some time thought of becoming a priest. Unlike their conservative brethren in the United States, most members of the Tory party would sooner eat glass than talk publicly about religion. Meantime, Blair published an essay this year called “Why I Am a Christian,” and he takes tremendous heat, given his party’s commitment to egalitarian education, because he sends one of his children to a Catholic school. (Blair takes communion at both Anglican and Catholic churches, giving hope to those who wish to bring the Church of England back into the arms of Rome four-and-a-half centuries after Henry VIII got his divorce.)

Now, according to informal surveys, over half the Labour party’s shadow- cabinet members attend church regularly, and they are willing to talk publicly about their religious convictions — this in a country where fewer people to go church than have affairs with Tory members of Parliament. Blair is a member of the Christian Socialists, which at this point is more Christian than socialist, the fastest-growing association inside the Labour party.

The talk of morality is getting so thick in the air that a former Labour official named Mike Marqusee has written a piece in the Nation called ” Britain’s Orgy of Piety” in which he unfurls his contempt for all the moral goings-on inside what was formerly a nice white-wine socialist party filled with joyless Harold Pinter-style debauchery and silent despair. Among the horrors cited by Marqusee are a new get-tough policy on crime, an announcement by Mr. Blair that the two-parent family is the “ideal” kind, and a Blair attack on “moral libertarianism.”

To sum up the Cavalier-Roundhead thesis: The Tories are a party either oblivious to or reticent about religion and social issues, with the sort of loose and ironic code of personal behavior you find among the upper classes or inside parties that believe they hold a permanent majority. They are what the Republican party might be if it didn’t have its socially conservative wing. Meanwhile, the Labour party has rediscovered its working-class Methodist roots, its tidy working-class morality, and has managed the impressive and politically potent feat of combining social conservatism with welfare-state liberalism.

I loved my Cavalier-Roundhead theory. I tested it against what I was seeing in various electoral districts. I proposed it to deep thinkers here. And within days it was in tatters.

In the first place, it is no longer possible to explain British politics in terms of class. This is one of Margaret Thatcher’s legacies. As Frank Johnson and Bruce Anderson of the London Spectator rather ruefully explained to me, the middle class has triumphed; the Conservative party has scarcely a trace left of the old landed-gentry sensibility. Under the high-school dropout John Major, who took over from Thatcher in 1990, the classlessness of the party has only deepened.

At the same time, the Labour party under Tony Blair is quickly losing its working-class flavor. For example, the party is featuring advertisements showing businessmen supporting Labour. One of the businessmen is shown saying kind words about Labour — the class-warrior party that drove Britain to a per capita income lower than Puerto Rico’s back in the 1970s — while riding in the back seat of his chauffeur-driven Mercedes.

Second, Blair’s effort to inject religion and religious morality into the campaign is a flop. Last week, he spent an entire day talking about the need to restore “the moral dimension” to politics. His efforts yielded nothing but a few brief stories buried inside the newspapers.

There may be a vestige of working-class Methodism in the party, but it’s a pretty tiny vestige. “Blair is a religiously serious man,” says Charles Moore, editor of the Daily Telegraph, “but those issues haven’t amounted to much.” The bulk of the Labour party is either bewildered by or hostile to all the Christian talk. John Major and the Tories dodge values talk by falling back on the old party theory that moral matters are for archbishops, not politicians — but the religious authorities here want no part of it. Different religious groups have issued three major reports during this campaign, all of them having to do with the need for greater funding of the welfare state. They sank without a trace.

Nor have the British people themselves shown an interest in a campaign centering on morality. The feeling is that any politician who tried to give a Murphy Brown-style speech would be hooted down for straying out of his area.

There is almost no talk among the major parties about abortion, euthanasia, gay marriage, pornography, the death penalty, or single parenthood. Though Blair has self-consciously modeled his move to the center-right on Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign, the one area in which he and the Labourites have not copied the Clintonites is in matters like school uniforms and child-safety seats, issues that Clinton used to win the soccer morns. The Labour party does have a line in its manifesto proposing a ban on cigarette advertising. It would be extremely controversial if anybody took it seriously, but nobody does.

The issues the politicians do want to talk about concern management: Who can run the welfare state more efficiently? Who can reduce the size of school classes with available resources? What is the proper amount of regulation in the workplace? As Guardian columnist Hugo Young says, the two parties agree or say they agree on capitalism (they’re for it), redistribution (both are against it), taxes (no increases), and public spending (same level as now) . So the only issue left to differ on is how to manage the status quo.

As my theory collapsed, I found myself thanking God for the Christian Coalition. American right-wing evangelicals shove values issues in our faces and make us debate them in political forums — perhaps not always subtly, but honestly, at least. And because American politicians are compelled to tackle these issues, American politics is concerned with the really important changes in American life, which have far more to do with values than they do with fiscal policy.

Our U.S. elections may seem boring and trivial, but they are nowhere near as inconsequential as Britain’s recent, values-free elections. The BBC has seen its evening-news ratings fall by a third during the election campaign. All of the newspapers are suffering circulation drops. This is striking because Britons are far more engaged in politics than Americans are, in part because the state has played a much larger role in British life than it ever has in America.

The politicians have responded to their reduced status by being even more aggressive on the stump. On TV and over the radio, John Major looks like a wimp, or, as he’s been described, a squirrel caught in the headlights. But in person he is deeply impressive, a far better stump speaker than either Dole or Clinton. He is somehow able to mold his metallic voice to Churchillian rhythms, and he is wonderfully fluid, speaking clearly and substantively for 45 minutes or so, breaking occasionally for asides that are quite witty. He can talk about his boyhood in working-class Brixton and the death of his father during his childhood in a way that is emotional without being sappy. He can even talk about the National Health Service without being boring, which is an incredible achievement.

But it’s in Q&As that British politicians excel, especially Major, because he is so brutal. At a recent press conference a reporter tried to needle him by asking whether he would support the European Union down the line, even if it adopted as official policy the killing of the firstborn. “Are you a firstborn?” Major asked. “Because if you are I would give that policy serious consideration.”

Blair is Clintonian in his soft rhetoric and his general sycophancy toward his audiences. Major is not. When a young man at a rally asked how he could trust Major given all the sleaze in the party, Major erupted in a five-minute barrage of controlled anger that pounded the poor guy into the ground. Indeed, during the 30-minute Q&A that day, everyone who asked a hostile question was squashed. Major is equally blunt with Blair in the House of Commons, of course, and in person you can finally see why his peers made him prime minister. Around a cabinet table, he must be a force.

The Tories were in the grip of a strange euphoria last week, telling one another that things were turning around and the race was about to tighten. They are responding to John Major’s success on the stump; after you see him, you can’t fathom how his party can be losing. But it is. The Tories are behind by about 20 points, and that gap has held steady for an amazing 56 months. Neither Major nor the booming economy has been able to improve Tory fortunes.

The Tories will lose this election, and the only question left is whether they will respond to defeat by moving right or left. It might not matter so much. Politics is a declining industry in post-Thatcher Britain. It attracts fewer true believers and more careerists, more interested in their lodgings and their lusts than in ideology or national greatness. We’ve seen what happens to countries that are overpoliticized, where politics crowds everyday life. Britain is an amusing and sobering object lesson in what happens to a country where politics doesn’t matter enough.

Senior editor David Brooks spent four and a half years as deputy editorial page editor for the Wall Street Journal’s European edition, published in Brussels.