The End of the Beginning?

So what's wrong with Britain that the next Prime Minister must tackle? Despite a sustained boom (which began under the Tories) that has boosted real incomes 9% since 1997 and a low-tax, low-regulation business climate that draws in foreign investment, Britain's infrastructure is creaking from decades of malnutrition. On health, Britain spends a smaller share of its gdp than any major industrialized country, one-third less than the average. The result: in Cardiff, some patients wait six years for hip operations. In Cumbria, it takes two years to see a psychologist. The average general practitioner now conducts more than 10,000 consultations a year and spends just eight minutes with each patient, which is grinding the doctors down and prompting early retirements despite a shortage. Even by 2005, after a spending boost that will direct an extra $1.5 billion a year to cancer and heart patients, the government's goal seems pathetically modest: to cut waiting time for heart operations from 18 months to six and to ensure that cancer victims are given treatment within two months of their doctor's referral.

Or take transport, a problem obvious to any Eurostar passenger as soon as the 300 km/h journey from Paris to the Channel tunnel stutters the rest of the way to London. The train network's managers have just announced they will need another $4 billion simply to repair cracked rails brought to light by the fatal crash at Hatfield last year. Highways are no better: in fact, they're in worse shape than at any time since 1977. "It will take three to four years simply to bring existing [road] assets into good repair," says John Dawson, policy director of the Automobile Association. Ramping up to European levels of spending to ease congestion will take at least two to four more.

One-third of 16- to 25-year-olds can't perform the minimum reading tasks required by a modern economy, putting Britain behind every Western European country except Ireland. One adult in five can't read well enough to find a plumber in the Yellow Pages. Blair's own spokesman, Alastair Campbell, has denounced "bog standard" secondary schools. Low educational attainment is a major reason why Britain's productivity and gdp per worker lag behind most of its competitors'.

Perhaps an awareness of how much remains to be done is responsible for Labour's surprisingly joyless campaign. The machine that seemed so fearsome seeking power in 1997 is now trying too hard. Did they really have to name the three buses traveling with Blair Strong Economy, Strong Leadership and Strong Britain? Must Labour's insipid theme song Lifted ("We could be lifted/ From the shadows, lifted/ Oh we could be lifted up today/ Lifted all the way, you and I forever") wash ceaselessly over the eardrums of callers to party headquarters? Did they have to choose a campaign slogan — "The Work Goes On" — that so oddly combines a grand tone with a promise to do nothing in particular? But New Labour has always overcompensated for its vulnerabilities. Its weak point this year is its record of spending much less on the country's problems than its can-do rhetoric implied. Blair's government stuck to Tory spending plans for its first two years, part of a discriminating theft of Thatcherite policies to reassure the middle class (now a majority) that old-fashioned socialism was dead.

But that means spending has grown less during this Parliament than under 18 years of the Tories — just 1.3% a year, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies. Transportation spending has actually dropped, while taxes have increased. New money is beginning to flood into public services — there is a $250 billion commitment to transport alone over the next decade — but the slow start has opened Labour to challenge. Liberal Democratic leader Charles Kennedy has skillfully exploited it, gaining points for honesty by openly advocating higher taxes to finance major improvements to health, pensions and especially schools. Amid signs the Lib-Dems might pick up votes from Labourites wanting to give Blair a kick in the pants, Labour shifted its slogan for the final week of the campaign to "Schools and Hospitals First."

The Conservatives' record in power and tax-cutting enthusiasm undercuts their freedom to attack Blair as too cheap. Hague has thus been forced to play to his base instead of the center, focusing on right-wing populist issues like putting all asylum seekers in detention centers and keeping Britain out of the euro. So far they haven't resonated, which has produced squabbling among frustrated Tories but no change of strategy.

Blair's rather highbrow charisma, however, does still resonate. He has mastered all the weird demands of modern electioneering: cheery chat with teenagers waiting nervously in a drizzle outside their sports college, showing off his smartest-boy-in-the-class command of arcane detail at town meetings with belligerent voters, rousing a geriatric crowd of Labour supporters with poll-tested lines he makes sound fresh on their hundredth utterance. His spokesman Campbell says campaigning "is actually a release from the pressures we normally face."

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, devours political biographies, 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 an edge of impatience and preoccupation that never goes away.

Its roots are deep. One aide says the Prime Minister has approached his job like "an egg-and-spoon race over broken glass for 200 miles. You've got this big majority, you don't want to drop it, you always feel like you're going to." What, the youngest Prime Minister in 185 years insecure? Yes, says a friend. "Without a doubt, there's a real problem of political confidence, intellectual confidence, drummed into Labour politicians who came of age in the 1980s," when Tories always won and the only way to make Labour electable was to impose iron discipline on its squabbling factions.

Those are the instincts behind Blair's most consistent mistake in office, an impulse to be a "control freak" — like devolving power to the Welsh Assembly and London mayor but then trying 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 for the next term are so big — not only to transform the public services, but to convince the "aspirational classes" that Labour delivers upward mobility and a better life, in order to "marginalize and crush the Conservative Party" for a generation, in the words of one aide — that it will be hard for the control freak to resist grabbing even more levers of power.

There are two reasons to think that may not happen. First, he has been faced with swelling resentment from doctors and teachers over a blizzard of detailed performance targets spewing from Whitehall. "There are so many priorities, we need a priority of the priorities!" exlaimed Cath Robinson, a doctor who talked to Blair at a town meeting of health workers in Norwich. To ease the logjam, ministers are planning to give front-line workers more money and autonomy. "Without simplifying and devolving power like this, there's no way to deliver the changes we want in time," says a senior aide. Blair's recent decision to give the head of London Transport more authority to negotiate how the struggling Underground will run, rather than let Brown dictate the arrangements, is a potential sign that this trend is real.

And, say several people close to him, Blair himself is changing. "He's more confident," says one. "It's strange, but I've seen it during the campaign. There's a serenity that's new." Of course, the prospect of a second famous victory will do that to a politician. But in this case, will the personal become the political? A more confident Blair may not feel so much need for aggressive spin or grim control-freakery. If, as he says, the success of his reforms depends on devolving power, what happens to the two Britains may depend to a surprising degree on what is happening inside the one mind of the man at the top.

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