Tony's Big Adventure

Courageous visionary or cornered opportunist? Confident democrat or hypocritical gambler? Tony Blair may qualify for all these titles thanks to his abrupt, massive and raggedly executed U-turn last week. After months of deriding a referendum on the proposed European Union constitution as a "gross and irresponsible betrayal of the true British national interest," he endorsed the idea after all. The normally dour Conservative leader, Michael Howard, was gleeful as he mocked Blair's pirouette during a House of Commons debate. "Six months ago, the Prime Minister stood before his party conference and said, with all the lip-quivering intensity for which he has become famous, 'I can only go one way. I've not got a reverse gear.' Today we could hear the gears grinding," he scoffed, to discomfort from the Labour benches and guffaws from his own.

But for Blair, Britain and the E.U., the referendum is no joke. By championing a cause many in his own party consider unwinnable, Blair is risking his premiership — a humiliating rout could drive him from office. His about-face not only raises the prospect that one of the E.U.'s major countries will veto a treaty that requires approval by all 25 members, but creates awkward problems for the governments that figured they could get by without votes of their own. French President Jacques Chirac in particular is now under pressure to give his stroppy voters their say, and they may well say non. Blair's move is a "big risk," said Austrian Chancellor Wolfgang Schüssel, "because domestic politics could very easily get mixed up with a fundamental European question, and that is always dangerous."

But Blair hopes it will at least get him through the night. The public's trust in him has taken a beating from the Iraq war and an occupation that is getting more dangerous every day. Howard, backed by several Euro-skeptic newspapers, had been scoring points off Blair for arrogance and untrustworthiness in blocking the referendum, a theme that would have dominated local and European elections in June and provided a big stick for pummeling Labour in the general election expected a year from now. "Blair is bowing to political reality," says one Labour official, and the Prime Minister himself put it in only slightly more elevated terms: "There is no point in continuing to have an argument about ... whether we are arrogant in refusing to listen to people. Let's clear it all out of the way and have a debate on the substance."

Can he win? British bookmaker Ladbrokes gave odds of 8 to 1 against. Dominic Cummings, former director of a successful campaign against the euro, cites polls showing acute skepticism of the E.U. and all its works: 67% of British voters say it's "failing"; only 27% want it to become a political union; tabloids regularly caricature meddling, know-nothing Brussels bureaucrats. An ICM survey taken after Blair's U-turn showed that only 25% of the British public planned to vote in favor of the constitution; according to Eurobarometer, the E.U.'s polling arm, average support for the pact in the rest of Europe is 77%.