Blair keeps fighting to the last
By CNN's European Political Editor Robin Oakley
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 Should Tony Blair win a third term, when will Gordon Brown succeed him?
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ROBIN OAKLEY'S ELECTION BLOG | |
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LONDON, England (CNN) -- Next time Tony Blair says he doesn't pay heed to the opinion polls I guess I'll have to believe him.
The polls show a widening gap between him and the Conservatives, with the Tories down to their lowest rating so far, and yet Blair is behaving as though it is a knife-edge election and running scared of the Liberal Democrats.
He remains worried enough to have surrendered at this late stage of the election a redoubt which Chancellor Gordon Brown has up until now defended with all guns blazing.
Blair has pledged that there will not only be no increase in the standard or higher rates of income tax but no increase in National Insurance either, as there was in the last parliament.
Did he consult the chancellor first? Was his reply to Channel 4's Jon Snow evidence of pre-poll jitteriness or, after an election in which Brown has been the central reassuring figure in Labour's campaign, rarely far from Blair's side, was it an attempt to reassert prime ministerial authority over policy?
Every time he has been asked that question Brown has clenched his eyebrows as if using them to strangle a tarantula and given a reply which kept the National Insurance option open, saying that no responsible chancellor or government would ever close off every option as John Major's government had once tried to do.
We are certainly learning more about Blair in this election, not least from the schmaltzy interview which Tony and Cherie gave jointly to Rupert Murdoch's Sun.
In what was presumably the first interest payment following the public commitment of Britain's biggest-selling daily to Labour, Cherie revealed that her husband never bought her anniversary cards but drew stick figures on a sheet of A4, and added "Tony loves Cherie" with 'loads of kisses.'
Yuk. As my old editor on the Sunday Express, John Junor, used to implore: "Pass the sick bag, Alice."
I am delighted they are happy together, but I do not want that sort of detail any more than I want to know the color of the prime ministerial underwear.
We nearly got that too, with Cherie urging Tony to strip off for the Sun's photographer on the basis of the Prime Minister being named "Torso of the week" and Blair claiming to be a five-times-a-night man. To be fair the prime minister did insist "I'm not doing anything cheesy," but that protestation was not too convincing from a man who went on to banter with the snapper that, on form, he was a "five-times-a-night man." Is there anything these people won't do in search of a big majority?
Poor Michael Howard, who has mercifully spared us such intimacies, must have felt like diving back under the bedclothes this morning when he saw the tracker poll in The Times giving Labour 41 per cent and his party only 27 per cent, four points below what they achieved in the last election drubbing in 2001.
He will comfort himself with the fact that there have been wide variations in the polls, that more than a third of the electorate are telling pollsters in this final week that they still have not made up their minds, and that there could still be a very low turnout. Labour too is still jumpy about a drift to the Liberal Democrats in the marginals.
But when you look at some of the more qualitative material in the opinion polls you do see why the Conservatives are in trouble.
Large numbers regard them as "seeming to appeal to only one section of society," "seeming stuck in the past," "appearing rather old and tired" and "seeking to divide people instead of bringing them together."
We remain, perhaps, a rather kinder, more tolerant society than the one we were assumed to be by the architects of the Tories' immigration policy.
Labour, by contrast, won good marks when people were asked which party's leaders were "prepared to take tough and unpopular decisions." That could be why the Iraq factor does not appear to have hit harder.
And the irony is that Tony Blair, who has always cared much too much about being liked, may do rather better out of being respected.
My esteemed colleague Bill Schneider, as ever, put his finger on it when we were discussing this on air and he quoted Bill Clinton's 2002 comment that it is "better to be strong and wrong than right and weak." The evidence so far for all the Labour twitchiness is that the British electorate agrees.
The BrainJuicer marketing organization had some interesting results with a poll of 1,263 women. They proved to be strongly in favor of the Conservative message on immigration but much more forgiving on Iraq, many saying that Blair should "stick to what he thinks is right" and that "basically it is history and not an issue for this election."
According to BrainJuicer, when women were asked what meal each of the parties would be the most frequent option chosen for Labour was: "A nice looking meal but with a lot of hidden additives."
The most frequent verdict on the Conservatives was "Reheated overpriced junk food in a posh packet" while the Liberal Democrats were dismissed as "Beefburger wishing it was steak."
