LONDON. My Examiner column this morning is on the British election, headlined “a pox on all three parties.” I covered my first British election in 1997, when Tony Blair’s “New Labour” party swept the Conservatives out of power after 18 years. The atmosphere was very different then. There was genuine enthusiasm for Blair, a sense that his reformed party was something genuinely new and promising, a bright new dawn feeling. Labour did not run as far ahead of Conservatives as the polls suggested (British polls over the years have tended to overstate the Labour vote) but the result was utterly unambiguous. Labour won over 400 seats in the House of Commons, to fewer than 200 for Conservatives; political patterns that had remained pretty steady in the 1979, 1983, 1987 and 1992 elections vanished utterly.
Nothing quite like that looks like happening tomorrow. The British press this week has been full of speculation about what will happen when the votes come in if no party has a majority of seats in the House of Commons. In 1997 there was no such problem. Around noon on the day after the election, I saw John Major drive into Buckingham Palace in the prime minister’s car. Less than an hour later he drove out in another car. He was no longer the prime minister; he had advised the Queen to call on Tony Blair to form a government, and she had done so. In the United States the transition period lasts more than two months, from the first week in November to January 20. In the United Kingdom it ordinarily takes less than 24 hours.
