GARETH COPLEY / PA-EMPICS TOUGH CALL Howard's emotive, negative campaign has galvanized his party but alienated others

Posted Sunday, May 1, 2005; 12.03 GMT
As the campaign entered its final few days, both the Conservatives and the Lib Dems cranked up the pressure on Blair over Iraq, in line with polls showing that trust was his weakest link. Lib Dem leader Charles Kennedy told Time that the "effect of Iraq has been very corrosive for the government and for Tony Blair. Even when the government is performing in a perfectly decent way, there is this lingering doubt." But will mistrust of Blair be enough to tip the balance against Labour?

The tories have run a clever campaign, fanning resentment that "hard-working people who play by the rules," as Howard puts it, are being held back by a government contemptuous of the truth and fair play. They have spent millions identifying voters who are most susceptible to targeted appeals in marginal constituencies that teeter on a few hundred or a thousand votes. The Lib Dems are hobbled by Britain's "first past the post" electoral system, which makes it hard for a third party to win any individual seat even if its national support is high. But they've achieved their best pre-election polls since the party began by aiming squarely at Labour supporters still burning about Iraq, including 1.6 million Muslims, who in some seats form a sizable bloc.

In seats where they and the Tories are the main contenders, Lib Dems encourage Labour supporters to vote tactically for them — and use the website www.tacticalvoter.net to arrange a vote swap with a Lib Dem who will vote Labour in a seat where that's the best chance for beating the Tories. Kennedy is making inroads among Labourites and swing voters who don't warm to the Tories but assume Blair's going to win anyway and want to cut his majority down to size.

That possibility, multiplied by millions, is what keeps the lights burning late at Labour headquarters. A sharply reduced majority might force Blair to resign quickly in favor of his heir apparent Gordon Brown, now Chancellor of the Exchequer, who would also be hampered by a weakened parliamentary party. And it would certainly complicate Blair's remaining time in government. "Blair couldn't manage with a majority of 50 seats," worries one of his allies. "It requires a type of politics [consensual, deal-making] he has never played."

It will still take a major upheaval for Michael Howard to sleep in Downing Street Friday night. Such has been the triumph of New Labour that the party of Margaret Thatcher remains on the defensive, its membership aging, unable to convince voters it has changed much since John Major was defeated in 1997. Labour now occupies the center so comprehensively that one of Blair's campaign themes has been to castigate the Tories for being like Labour in the 1980s, an ideologically pure rump unwilling to buckle down to the self-criticism needed to regain voters' trust. Brown even has the cheek to razz Howard's spending plans for lacking fealty to the Iron Lady. "No election program of Mrs. Thatcher would have contained such irresponsible promises," he harrumphed — and such is Labour's record of fiscal probity that he got away with it.

The economy is one of Labour's electoral trump cards, but it's not difficult to spot problems that may surface in a third term. Labour's pledge to revitalize the public services is a huge undertaking, requiring time-consuming training of teachers and doctors, hundreds of new buildings costing billions, and management and financial overhauls. Constrained by a fixation on keeping taxes low by European standards — in 2003, 37% of gdp compared to 46% in France and 42% in Germany — progress has been slower than the fizzy expectations uncorked by Blair's first landslide. Among experts, there are serious arguments about whether Labour's favored formula of private financing coupled with detailed performance targets in the public services is getting good results or whether it distorts priorities and wastes money, as the Tories contend. Blair's insistence on more private money for universities, and for new hospitals that control their own finances outside the National Health Service, sparked rebellions by Labour backbenchers who believe the changes will promote inequality.

More depressing for Labour campaign managers: surveys show people haven't noticed the improvements that really have taken place since 1997. They're beginning to be satisfied with the policing, health care and education they receive in their own area, but think their personal good experience is a fluke — especially because newspapers can find plenty of individual horror stories. Last year pollsters put a series of "objectively uncontroversial" statements to a representative sample and found incredulity. "There is faster access to treatment in nhs hospitals"; only 35% believed it. "There are thousands more teachers working in our schools"; 34%. "The overall level of crime has fallen"; 29%. Yet all the statements are true.

That's why Iraq has potency beyond the 18% of people who consider it a "very important" issue in its own right. Blair has been Labour's ubiquitous brand image for 10 years. Now, with only 32% trusting him, his key political task of assembling disparate shards of favorable evidence about public services into a compelling account of national progress is easily drowned out by the din of people calling him a liar. Sighs one adviser at Labour campaign headquarters: "Our problem is Iraq and trust, and voters are going to punish us for it, and there's really nothing Tony can do to make it better."

The question for Michael Howard is how much he can make it worse. On a recent afternoon in Milton Keynes, a new town started in the 1960s that now has 208,000 people and a marginal Labour seat, he got off his battle bus and walked briskly through a shopping center, shaking hands, joshing, asking for votes and getting some, before giving a brisk stump speech. In person, the 63-year-old son of a Romanian Jewish immigrant, a lawyer who rose quickly in the Conservative Party to become John Major's Home Secretary, is appealing and a decent campaigner. But his TV image is colder, like a bank manager or prosecutor, and his previous role as a hard-line, high-profile Tory minister reinforces the view that the party hasn't changed much. "The more people see him, the better it is for us," exults one Labour strategist. Only 36% consider him trustworthy, scarcely better than Blair's 32%. According to MORI, 53% think he's not ready to be Prime Minister.

Howard dislikes Blair personally; he once said, "Blair thinks he walks on water," and then, with a mirthless laugh, "No, he thinks he's God." But his campaign, though it's become bitterly personal at the end, has been precisely calculated. After listening to what bothered focus groups the most about Blair, the Tories devised five promises in 10 words — "lower taxes, school discipline, cleaner hospitals, more police, controlled immigration." These pledges have been endlessly repeated and carefully embedded in Howard's dark rhetoric about "the forgotten majority," who "have suffered in silence for the last eight years, and felt no one is on their side," and whose hard work "is not recognized or rewarded" by Labour. The ultra-right French National Front used the slogan vous pensez ce que nous pensons; the Tories, perhaps coincidentally, settled on are you thinking what we're thinking?

The red meat of grievance has energized Conservatives. Howard's plan to impose a tough annual cap on all immigrants, including asylum seekers, scored with Labour voters, too, even though the government had already ostentatiously toughened up in this area. For a while, the polls surged for the Tories, as voters' ears pricked up to their emotionally resonant issues, especially immigration. Their chief strategist, Lynton Crosby, likened their appeal to a dog whistle. But polls show the rest of the country has been turning off. Mark Penn, a U.S. pollster working for Labour, says Howard's harsh language, especially his recent venomous attacks on Blair, have "appealed to his base but appalled the rest." Immigration is the only issue where Howard leads in the polls; on the economy, education, health, taxation and terrorism, Blair is ahead. Chris Patten, former Conservative Party chairman and to the left of its current leadership, observes, "When I whistle for my dog, I don't find that a lot of others come, too."

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