JUST LIKE BILL?

Monday, Apr. 28, 1997 By BARRY HILLENBRAND AND MICHAEL KRAMER/LONDON

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It didn't take a politician of Churchillian stature to figure out what needed doing. The Labour Party hadn't won a national election in Britain for 23 years. Its tattered platform of watered-down Bolshevism had become as irrelevant as the suits of armor in the Tower of London.

No one will probably mistake him for Churchill, but when Tony Blair grabbed the leadership of the Labourites in 1994, he trashed the old lefties and jerked the party into the post-ideological center. And now he is on a roll. He may even be unstoppable. If the polls are accurate, and they have been remarkably consistent for months, Britain on May 1 will have its first Labour Party Prime Minister since James Callaghan lost to Margaret Thatcher in 1979.

Political success is often accidental (Blair took command after his predecessor died of a heart attack), but it also comes from calculation. Just as Bill Clinton reinvented himself as a New Democrat to capture the White House in 1992, and then as a reborn centrist to win a second term last year, Blair has retooled Labour so that it sometimes seems like nothing but a more caring version of Toryism. Gone are the old socialist slogans. Gone is the pledge to redistribute income and nationalize industries. Blair calls his party "new Labour." His opponent, Conservative Prime Minister John Major, describes it as "really pretty much us."

To thwart what seems inevitable, Major's troops have turned to the same weapon George Bush wielded unsuccessfully against Clinton. Blair, they charge, is merely an opportunist, a leftist in middle-of-the-road campaign clothing. "With Labour taking many of our positions and all of those that are most important," says Tory strategist Andrew Cooper, "fear is all we've got left. We've got to try and cause people to worry that Tony's changes are just for show, to fear his change rather than welcome him as a nonthreatening crypto-Conservative they can comfortably take a risk on. It hasn't been easy."

Which is putting it mildly. Blair isn't as publicly empathetic as Clinton, but as he demonstrated in late March, he is equally deft. The Tories had claimed "proof" that Blair was secretly planning to restore union power once in office. For many in Britain, calling someone a closet union lover is like saying in the U.S. that someone is soft on crime. Thatcher rode to Downing Street on a promise to curb union influence. If it worked for the Iron Lady, Major's camp figured, why not try it again? Trouble is, Blair's view that employees should be permitted to join a union if a majority vote to do so is neither new nor particularly objectionable. Still, Blair reasoned, simply stating the facts might not do the trick--and he dearly wanted to spike the Tory attack since it struck at the very heart of his hard-won Labour Party reforms.

So Blair reached across the Atlantic for cover. But not to Clinton, whose tactics, strategy and substantive prescriptions he has occasionally borrowed and with whom he is often compared. No, this time Blair went for the big embrace, straight past Clinton to Thatcher's old ideological soul mate Ronald Reagan.