Exit Blair…

Brown has been the next prime minister for more than a decade. He was already the heir apparent to Tony Blair when Labour swept to power in 1997. But like an ambitious dauphin whose monarch refuses to die, Brown was forced to wait and wait and anxiously and impatiently wait. And the longer he waited, the less appealing he seemed. Brown is a kind of British version of Hillary Clinton–the experienced, intellectually gifted frontrunner who has vanquished all challengers by creating an aura of inevitability about his succession, but who manages to engender no real affection or enthusiasm among the voters.

When Brown finally effected a clumsy coup last September that forced Blair to announce he would quit within the year, it only added to the sense that his was going to be a Pyrrhic, and shortlived, victory. The Conservative party, moribund for the last 10 years after dominating British politics for the previous 20, has been showing real signs of life in the last year under its new charismatic, if slightly vacuous, leader David Cameron, who could not disguise the relish with which he looked forward to the contest with Brown.

But in the course of a frantic few days last week, Brown managed to sprinkle a little pixie dust onto his lugubrious and largely uncelebrated accession. First, a few days before the handover, he orchestrated a bizarre piece of political theater, letting it be known that he had invited Lord Paddy Ashdown of the third-party Liberal Democrats (known to non-British readers as an energetic peace envoy in the Balkans and elsewhere) to join his cabinet. Given that Labour has a large enough majority in the House of Commons on its own, this was a purely political move. As well as wrongfooting the Liberal Democrats, who have the capacity to inflict real damage on Labour in the next election, the move had the startling effect of making Brown look magnanimous, reaching out to political opponents, willing to work in a bipartisan way on the nation’s future.

Since the new prime minister has long had a reputation, even among his admirers, as a control freak–reluctant to share power with anyone inside his own party, let alone outside it–this was quite a change. And even though the Liberal Democrats noisily declined the offer, the image of a different, more collegial Brown lingered, improbably, in the haze.

Then, the day before he was due to take office, Brown engineered one of those pieces of pure Westminster political theater in which a hitherto utterly unknown member of parliament suddenly becomes a cause célèbre and the object of equal amounts of adulation and loathing. We are talking, of course, about a good old-fashioned political defection of a backbencher from one party to the other–in this case, Quentin Davies, an obscure Conservative MP who crossed the floor to join Labour.

This too made Brown look inclusive and statesmanlike, and his seething Tory opponents look bickering and factionalized. So much for Cameron’s flair and élan; he had been taught a lesson in political pyrotechnics by his colorless opponent.

Then the new prime minister, the second most familiar figure in British politics, co-genitor of the Blair-Brown New Labour revolution these last ten years, suddenly cast himself as the agent of change. In his inaugural remarks on the threshold of No. 10 Downing Street last week, Brown used the word “change” eight times in a two-minute speech.

So the transition has gone quite well for Brown. But can he possibly keep it up? In fact, the Brown accession–as smoothly as it has gone so far–is a long way short of completion.

What the new prime minister is attempting to pull off is one of the most familiar but rarely successfully executed maneuvers in democratic politics, and one that could have big lessons for this country’s Republican party.

Like the Conservative John Major, who replaced Margaret Thatcher, like Nicolas Sarkozy, the French conservative who replaced Jacques Chirac as French president this May, Brown is trying to demonstrate that the public’s hunger for change can be met without ditching the governing party, but merely by changing its leader. If Brown can persuade the public that change in the leadership of the ruling party is sufficient change, then he could yet achieve a famous victory at a general election in a year or two. (For Republicans, the lesson might just be the same.)

The most obvious–and from Washington’s point of view the most alarming–move would be a radical shift from the unpopular foreign policy of Tony Blair. Cut yourself off from George Bush; pull British troops out of Iraq; strike a new tone in the Middle East, Brown is being urged by some of his advisers.

The new prime minister doesn’t seem quite ready to do that. What he appears to be doing is insisting on his pro-American credentials, while giving subtle hints that he will move in a somewhat different direction than the one chosen by Blair and gently distancing himself from the Bush administration.

In his cabinet appointments announced last week, he signaled a distinctly less pro-American and pro-Israeli line. David Miliband, who is the new foreign secretary, was a critic of Israel’s war against Lebanon last year; John Denham, an undistinguished minister, returns to government, having quit Tony Blair’s government over the Iraq war. And most eyebrow-raising, Mark Malloch Brown, who was Kofi Annan’s deputy at the United Nations, and a fervent basher of American conservatives and President Bush in particular, has been given a special ministerial role for Africa.

But it is well enough known by now that the new prime minister is an enthusiastic pro-American. As chancellor of the exchequer, he has come to appreciate more than ever the advantages of the capitalist American model. An avid student of American history and politics, Brown sometimes seems to be consciously modeling himself on great Americans. In his acceptance speech to the special Labour conference that chose him (unopposed) as leader last week, he quoted Abraham Lincoln, promising to appeal to the “better angels” of our nature. And he recently published the book Courage, a series of eight profiles of his personal heroes. If it turns out Brown’s father bought him the election that secured him the Labour leadership, the American analogy would be complete.

Of course this might all be an elaborate smokescreen of rhetoric and image behind which he can execute a radical change in U.K. policy away from Washington, but I doubt it. Brown has no interest in getting into fights with the United States. He knows the Iraq war is unpopular in America too and that the course of events there could change sharply in the next few months.

Brown has been careful to cultivate good connections with members of the Bush administration, even with the president himself. He also knows that President Bush, toxic in British politics, won’t be around for more than a year and a half, and he thinks he can have a warm relationship with his successor, whether that be Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Fred Thompson, or Rudolph Giuliani.

That does not mean Brown will not change aspects of foreign policy. He will regurgitate the left-wing bromide that winning the war on terror means winning the battle for hearts and minds, rather than fighting hot wars. But he will be unstinting in pursuit of terrorists at home and abroad, and plans a major–and most welcome–effort to replace Britain’s invidious multicultural sludge with the harder substance of patriotism and national identity.

But if his foreign policy is not going to change much, what remains if Brown is to be the changemaker?

Another way of posing this question, Brown’s friends believe, is to ask what was it, other than Iraq, that people really didn’t like about Tony Blair? The answer, they think, has much to do with style. There was always something a bit too slick about Blair, a bit too much charisma that allowed him to ride roughshod over the views of his colleagues. Brown intends to make a virtue of his very seriousness, his staid, stolid approach to government. This will also help him contend with the challenge from David Cameron, the Conservative leader, whom Labourites regard as a bit of a Blair himself. In addition, there will be changes of personnel. Announcing his cabinet, Brown emphasized he wanted a government “of all the talents.” New faces at the Treasury and the Foreign Office will give the Labour government a much needed jolt of energy.

Will this be enough? Brown can’t really change much of the substance of Labour over the last ten years because he, as well as Blair, has been so influential over it. The hope is that voters will be persuaded by the change of style and tone. The evidence, however, suggests that they want a change of direction as well. Tony Blair had led Britain falteringly in the direction of greater choice in the provision of public services in the last few years, to tackle the bloated growth of the state. Brown, if anything, seems wary of pushing further in that direction, more inclined to slow the already glacial pace in the opening up of the public sector.

This is not the lesson to be learned either from Major’s initial success in replacing Thatcher, or in Sarkozy’s sharp turn in succeeding Chirac. Both represented a change of style, certainly, but both also represented radical change in direction.

There’s another recent precedent of a party that changed its head, bestowing the leadership on a successor anointed long in advance, a successor who had been closely identified with the policies of the government all along.

In 2003 Paul Martin became prime minister of Canada, after nearly a decade as finance minister and heir apparent to Jean Chrétien. But by the time he got the top job, voters wanted real change, not just a change in the leader. Unable to deliver on that demand, within three years he was out of office, rejected by the voters.

Gordon Brown got off to a good start last week. But, unless he can persuade the British that his changes are about more than names, faces, and appearances, the unhappy Canadian precedent looks more relevant than those other, more successful transitions.

Gerard Baker, U.S. editor of the Times of London, is a contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD.