The End of the Beginning?

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Just a few kilometers from central London — home to the spectacular new Tate Modern gallery, million-dollar apartments and thronged restaurants 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 found himself in a 20-patient ward at the Whittington Hospital in north London.

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Four nurses were supposed to be on duty, but because of staff shortages there were often only two. Visitors found Brunton several times lying in his own excrement. Harried staffers often failed to put on his glasses or hearing aid or dentures, so he spent hours in bed cut off from the world. He got bedsores. For two days in March, when outside temperatures were just above freezing, the central heating was turned off for repairs and his own temperature plummeted alarmingly. His children were told the hospital's warming suit was already in use, so Brunton was simply wrapped in an insulating blanket and left to get warmer on his own — which he did. Later they thought he was hallucinating when he said a man had come through the ceiling. But sure enough, there was a hole there left by a worker struggling to repair something in the decrepit Victorian pile, ranked as one of Britain's top 40 hospitals.

Paddy Brunton died April 15 after six weeks in such conditions. The doctors and nurses who looked after him "worked heroically," says his son Paul, "but the system was broken. Everything about the place was dispiriting. The right hand never knew what the left hand was doing. I think he, anyone, has the right to expect better in his last days."

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 10 Downing St. in this week's general election, he has a record to defend — and the euphoria that once greeted the earnest young man has dissipated.

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. The world's fourth-largest economy may be Cool Britannia, but it is also the sick man of Europe, trailing behind its Continental neighbors in many measures of quality of life.

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 and cost twice as much as promised. "We have a long, long way to go," Blair says repeatedly. Stranger still, voters are buying his plea for patience, even if it makes them grimace. One week before election day, a MORI poll gives Labour an astonishing 18-point lead over the Conservatives, whose leader, William Hague, nevertheless maintains an almost otherworldly serenity.

Not only do voters consider Blair more capable than Hague (50% to 16%), they also reject the Tories' key domestic pledge, an American-inspired plan to cut taxes by at least $12 billion a year, possibly up to $30 billion. According to an ICM poll, voters prefer Labour's tax policies to the Conservatives' by 31% to 18%. On the issues they rate most important — health, crime, education, the economy — voters decisively back Labour. And while they slightly prefer Hague's determination to keep out of the euro, which he has been stressing, over Blair's "wait and see" approach (27% to 26%), this issue ranks a mere 11th in importance. Funeral pyres of diseased livestock may be spewing smoke over the countryside, some of Blair's ministers may have resigned in disgrace, the Millennium Dome may be a universal symbol of grandiose incompetence — but Sue Heppel, a shop assistant who watched Hague campaign in Portsmouth, sums up the dominant view: "The Conservatives bitch a lot. Labour hasn't had a chance to finish everything off." Barring an upheaval, Blair will be easily returned to office on Thursday.

Still, the election is a watershed. If Blair loses, it will be a spectacular upset. If he wins, he will be heading toward a historic first: two full terms of a Labour government and a run at a third. Blair doesn't want to look power-mad by talking about the next election, but it's already in his sights — and he knows that winning it will depend on visibly fixing what ails Britain. One Labour insider says that "politics in a second term will become quite mundane, focusing on the nitty-gritty of how hospitals, doctors' surgeries, classrooms work." Another says that while implementing detailed reforms is not Blair's strong point, he will slog through it in the service of a historic goal: "We have to be the new Victorians — believing in progress, believing the country can be great again, turning around its trajectory of decline." Does he think the turnaround has begun yet? "No. But I think we could, in a radical second term."

That word radical is one of Blair's campaign favorites. Public patience, however, is already frayed. Blair's legendary p.r. machine is now undercut by stories of its dark arts; former Prime Minister John Major denounced it last week for "spin and deceit." Turnout on election day is expected to be low because of voter suspicion that Blair's notion of a radical second term will be more disappointment, attractively packaged. Both friend and foe can now be heard in Westminster predicting Blair will quit during the next term. A longtime adviser suggests the Prime Minister will indeed leave in four or five years, while he's still young enough to do something else — an outcome deeply desired by his heir apparent Gordon Brown, the brooding Chancellor of the Exchequer. A Liberal Democrat official is sure Blair will go too, while the going is good: "He has set up an unbridgeable gap between expectations and reality and filled it with half-truths. He'll leave because he can't sustain it."