Blair's Next Move

By J.F.O. McAllister/London

Just a few miles from central London, home to the spectacular new Tate Modern and million-dollar apartments that reflect the prosperous, optimistic side of Tony Blair's Britain, Paddy Brunton spent his final days in a rather different country. Brunton, 80, a former BBC electrician, developed blood clots in his heart and lungs in February. After an eight-hour wait for a bed, he was admitted to a 20-patient ward at the Whittington Hospital in north London, one of the top 40 in Britain.

Four nurses were supposed to be on duty, but because of staff shortages, there were often only two. Several times visitors found Brunton lying in his own excrement. He got bedsores. For two days in March, when outside temperatures were just above freezing, the heating in the Victorian pile was turned off for repairs and his temperature plummeted alarmingly. Brunton was wrapped in an insulating blanket to get warmer on his own, which he did. After six weeks in such conditions, Brunton died. The doctors and nurses who looked after him "worked heroically," says his son Paul. "But the system was broken."

Blair and the Labour Party certainly gave him reason to expect better when, in 1997, they swept away a Conservative Party exhausted after 18 years in power. Labour's promise to fix such things as the National Health Service was enough to win a huge parliamentary majority. Now, as Blair asks voters to give him another term in No. 10 Downing St. in this week's general election, his campaign uneasily straddles two Britains. One is the sunny, upbeat land shown in Labour's emotive TV broadcasts: unemployment, inflation and interest rates all at 25-year lows; real incomes and primary-school test scores rising; crime falling. But there is another Britain, of shabby hospitals, underpaid teachers, overcrowded schools and 7 million adults who are functionally illiterate.

Strangely, it is on the stony ground of unfulfilled hopes that Labour has made its stand--like a builder who tells you six months into the job that renovating your house will take twice as long as promised. "We have a long, long way to go," Blair says repeatedly. Voters are buying it, even if it makes them grimace. Not only do voters consider Blair more capable than Tory leader William Hague (50% to 16%) but they also reject the Tories' key domestic pledge, an American-inspired plan to cut taxes at least $12 billion a year.

So what are the problems with Britain that the next Prime Minister must tackle? Despite a sustained boom that has boosted real incomes 9% since Blair came to power, the country's infrastructure is creaking from decades of malnutrition. On health, Britain spends a smaller share of its GDP than any other major industrialized country. The result: in Cardiff some patients wait six years for hip operations; in Cumbria it takes two years to see a psychologist. On transport, problems are obvious to any Eurostar passenger as soon as the 185-m.p.h. train from Paris to the Channel Tunnel stutters the rest of the way to London. The train network's managers have just announced a need for an additional $4 billion to repair cracked rails brought to light by a fatal crash last year. Highways are in worse shape than at any time since 1977. One adult in five can't read well enough to find a plumber in the Yellow Pages.

Perhaps an awareness of how much remains to be done is responsible for Labour's surprisingly joyless campaign. The American-style machine that seemed so fearsome in 1997 is now trying too hard--even naming the three buses traveling with Blair "Strong Economy," "Strong Leadership" and "Strong Britain." Labour is overcompensating for its dirty little secret: an average government spending increase so far, despite all its can-do rhetoric, of a measly 1.3% a year, part of its obsession with reassuring the middle class that it wouldn't be profligate. Big money started to flow this year, but the lag has allowed Liberal Democratic leader Charles Kennedy to attack Blair from the left, advocating an income tax increase to pay for better services. The Tories' record in power undercuts their freedom to call Blair too cheap. Hague has thus been forced to play to his base, focusing on such right-wing populist issues as detaining all asylum seekers and, especially, keeping Britain out of Europe's single currency. Two-thirds of voters back him on that, but it ranks 11th on a list of issues they consider most important.

Blair's cool charisma, however, does still resonate. He has mastered all the weird demands of modern electioneering, from small talk with nervous students to command of arcane detail under TV cross-examination. Blair likes his job, though it has clearly aged him. Unlike his friend Bill Clinton, "he never shouts at people; he's a motivator for his staff--even in a crisis he cracks jokes," says an adviser. He goes to movies, plays tough tennis, loves The Simpsons. He can even be seen pushing baby Leo's pram by himself in St. James's Park on a Sunday. But beyond the benign family man and the carefully primped "Strong Leader" campaign persona, there is always an edge of impatience.

That tension lies behind his most consistent mistake in office: an impulse to be a "control freak"--as when he devolved power to the Welsh assembly and the London mayor but then tried to rig things so his cronies would be in charge. In both cases the locals rebelled, and Blair looked both sinister and silly. His ambitions to remake the country are so big that it may be hard for the control freak to resist grabbing even more levers of power.

Yet there are two reasons to think that may not happen. First, faced with swelling resentment from doctors and teachers over a blizzard of detailed performance targets spewing from London, he is planning to give them more money and autonomy. That means a less centralized vision for reform. And, say several people close to him, Blair is changing. "He's more confident," says one. "There's a serenity that's new." In this case, will the personal become the political? If, as Blair says, the success of his reforms depends on decentralizing power, the fate of the two Britains may depend to a surprising degree on what is happening inside the mind of the one man at the top.

Meanwhile, outside the ward where Paddy Brunton died, work has begun on a new hospital wing. It is due to open in 2004--two years before the next general election must be called.

--With reporting by Anthee Carassava and Helen Gibson with Blair, Hague and Kennedy

With reporting by Anthee Carassava and Helen Gibson with Blair, Hague and Kennedy