Tory story

IN 1987, JAMES RESTON of The New York Times dropped in on the British general election and made a perceptive comparison between two countries and two leaders. Although the American people had ceased by then to think that Ronald Reagan had much left to offer them, he opined, they were still fond of him personally. By contrast, the British had never actually liked Margaret Thatcher, but they continued to think that she was doing the country good. Lady Thatcher has long been an inspiration for Tony Blair, and as he approaches the general election on Thursday, he must pray that 1987 is a hopeful precedent.

Unlike Thatcher (who, to her credit, never wanted to be liked), Blair has enjoyed a personal luster that is now unmistakably faded. Philip Gould, the prime minister's pollster, has reportedly told him in blunt terms what newspaper polls anyway confirm: Once an asset to his party, Blair is now an active liability. The question that remains to be answered on election day is whether the British still think his Labour government is doing them good.

Blair's career and position have always been curious. The political journalist-turned-novelist Robert Harris, who has known Blair longer and better than most commentators, observed last summer that for all his brilliant electoral successes he has never had a personal following within his own party. ''If Blair did have a faction,'' Harris wrote in The Daily Telegraph, ''it would probably not be on the Left at all, but located somewhere deep within the Conservative Party. Right-wing in his instincts even before he became party leader, Blair has clearly moved further to the Right since entering Downing Street.'' Almost as much as David Lloyd George more than 80 years ago, Blair has become ''a prime minister without a party.''

This also helps explain the Tories' continuing woes: A conservative leading a Labour government is a very difficult target.

For their part, the Tories are dreaming not of '87 but '70, when Prime Minister Harold Wilson, to his astonishment and rage, was denied a third term by the Conservatives. There are other echoes of that year. Like the utterly charmless Edward Heath, who defeated Wilson, current Tory leader Michael Howard is far from being a charismatic or loveable public figure.

In 1970 the Tories were held to have adopted an unusually right-wing platform, which just shows how much the political terms of trade have changed in 35 years. What were then ''far right'' positions - in terms of the market economy rather than central planning and state ownership - are now the common currency of all parties. But Blair has gone even further, stealing the Tories' clothes on everything from crime to health. Paradoxically, that lies behind the extreme bitterness of this election.

Henry Kissinger quipped that academic politics are so much more savage than any other kind because there's so little at stake. In a comparable way, the fact that the differences between Labour and Tories on taxation, spending, and the management of the economy are narrower than ever explains why the election is so vituperative. Still, on the Tory side that ferocity sometimes looks like desperation.

. . .

Here I should perhaps declare an interest, as they say in the House of Commons. I have a little dog of my own in this fight, in the form of a new book with the unoriginal but unambiguous title ''The Strange Death of Tory England.'' To publish such a book just before an election that the Conservatives might in theory win was always a gamble, and I have been wryly telling television and radio interviewers that on May 6 my book will either be reprinted or pulped.

Over the past week I have therefore watched intently as the Blair campaign team displayed increasing jitters. Despite all the efforts of the government to avoid discussing Iraq, the war has resurfaced as a central issue - and one which must remind voters of the great question mark hanging over Blair's personal honesty. Labour are terrified, not that many of their supporters will vote Tory but that, in their disillusionment, they just won't turn out.

Even so, given the polls, it will take an unimaginable upset for the Tories actually to win, and my book's argument may yet prove truer than I knew. I suggest that, while Lady Thatcher carried out a historically necessary transformation of the country, she nearly destroyed her own party in the process. Since then the country has changed and the Tories have changed, but not in the same direction. In England even more than in America, the right has won politically while the left has won culturally, but here that has spelled disaster for the Tories.

More than one Tory has accused me of writing a thriller without a corpse. Has the party yet expired? Well, the Conservatives were always a ''party of government'' or they were nothing, endlessly adapting and reinventing themselves in order to hold onto power. Today they have already been out of office for longer than at any time in 90 years, and if they lose the election they will shortly thereafter have been out of power for longer than at any time since the 18th century. When is a parrot a dead parrot?

After the last election, the Tories chose almost by accident the sadly inadequate Iain Duncan Smith as leader. But then in the fall of 2003 they showed a little of their old ruthless survival instinct by ousting him in an internal coup and replacing him with the clever but devious Michael Howard. He faced a very heavy task. Not only have the Tories suffered two shattering defeats, but they find the electoral deck stacked against them.

In America, an Electoral College majority can be won with a minority of popular votes, and there are similar distortions in the British system. For most of the past century, a ''wasted'' Labour vote in huge mining or industrial constituencies gave the Conservatives - whose strength was in the shires and suburbs - more parliamentary seats than they deserved. So it was that in 1951 (Al Gore may be interested to know) the Labour party under Attlee won a clear victory in the popular vote, but Churchill and the Tories gained 24 more parliamentary seats.

In recent years, and almost without anyone noticing, that distortion has been reversed. Working-class districts have emptied, suburban constituencies have grown, but electoral boundaries haven't kept up with population change. The result is that it now takes substantially fewer votes to elect a Labour MP than a Tory, and Howard is acutely aware that he will need to be well ahead in votes to win a parliamentary majority.

The Tories' response has been to wage a harsh and even demagogic campaign, built on plain fear. Voters are warned of rising crime and dirty hospitals, they're told they need more policemen, and asked ''What's wrong with a little discipline in schools?'' One ad set the tone: ''How would you feel if a bloke on early release attacked your daughter?'' As Michael Dukakis would surely recognize, this is Willie Horton territory, and it is something quite new in British politics.

So is the bare-knuckle Tory language on immigration and asylum seekers. Howard began some weeks ago by attacking gypsies, and he has relentlessly warned that large numbers of immigrants are flooding across our uncontrolled borders ''possibly for nefarious purposes.'' Another Tory candidate faked a photograph to portray himself battling with asylum seekers, while another runs on the slogan, ''What part of ‘Send them back' don't you understand, Mr. Blair?''

The latest Tory hardball is more a spitball. Last week a poster appeared showing Blair's face with the slogan, ''If he's prepared to tell lies to take us to war he's prepared to lie to win an election.'' It is quite true that, as we learned on Wednesday, the attorney general's original opinion about the legality of an Iraq war was distorted for consumption by Parliament or even by the Cabinet. Nevertheless, there are even senior Tories who privately dislike this blatant use of the word ''lie.'' And in any case, the Tories are in an awkward position, since they supported the war, and can scarcely make it the main stick with which to beat Blair.

This is not the party of such enlightened Tories as R.A. Butler and Iain Macleod 40 years ago - or, for that matter, of the young Michael Howard, who began life on the party's liberal wing. His campaign flies in the face of an old dictum: A Tory leader must have ''drawing power in the crucial central area of politics.'' That was what Macleod wrote, insisting that the leader must be able to attract wide support from outside his own party, since ''without such an appeal no general election can be won.''

Understandably some Tories look with envy at the Republicans and the electoral successes of American conservatism, compassionate or otherwise. Alas for Howard, the political and social conditions in Britain are so different, from the complete absence of a religious right (or religious anything) to the far deeper roots of collectivism, that it's hard to see any real analogy.

And Blair remains Thatcher's heir - but with a twist. Even at her most insufferable, Thatcher could be defended on the Viennese saying that if you want the meat you have to pay for the bones. Blair adroitly took the meat and left the Tories the bones. That is why, even now that the prime minister's allure is much diminished, the Conservative party which dominated British politics for most of the 20th century is still on the defensive, and could yet disappear from the pages of history.

Geoffrey Wheatcroft is an English journalist and author. His books include ''The Controversy of Zion'' and ''The Strange Death of Tory England,'' published in the UK in March.