Last week's elections made it clear that although the British public still has faith in a Labour party, Blair's days are numbered, writes Alistair Alexander from London Britain's general elections last week saw Tony Blair's Labour Party returning to power for an unprecedented third term, but with its majority sharply reduced to 66 members of parliament. For each of the three main parties, however, the election results present difficult questions that they will struggle to address in the months ahead. The most pressing question facing the Labour Party is the future of its leader Tony Blair. The party's share of the vote dropped by 5.5 per cent and that, combined with a low turnout of 62 per cent, gives Blair the dubious honour of being returned to power with the lowest ever level of public support -- about 22 per cent of the electorate. Labour MPs were shocked to discover the depth of hostility to Blair as they campaigned doorstep to doorstep in their constituencies, although how their leader's unpopularity had hitherto escaped them suggests just how insulated the politics of Westminster has become from public opinion. The majority of the public now firmly believes Blair lied over Iraq. Once considered his party's greatest electoral asset, the elections cruelly exposed the fact that he is now an electoral liability. The Labour campaign was hardly helped by the exposure of the attorney- general's legal advice to the prime minister in the run up to the Iraq war. The leaked memo revealed that Blair had been advised that an invasion without a second UN resolution might well be illegal, despite his insistence for over two years that the advice he received said no such thing. Even before the leak, Iraq loomed like a black cloud over the elections. The Labour campaign team desperately tried to shift the focus to what it called "issues of substance" -- although Iraq has dominated the last four years to such a great extent, that Labour have precious few tangible achievements to show for their second term of government. The lacklustre campaign also brought the fraught relationship between Blair and Gordon Brown, his powerful chancellor and rival for the party leadership, into even sharper focus. Blair prepared for the elections last year by appointing a key ally, Alan Milburn, to head the Labour campaign, a role Brown had held in the previous two elections. The move appeared to be a concerted attempt to sideline Brown, particularly when anonymous Blair aides suggested to the media that Brown might be moved after the elections from his powerbase in the Treasury to the Foreign Office. Unfortunately for the prime minister, however, Milburn's manifesto pledges received a distinctly tepid welcome from the public and the media. Even more unfortunately, Labour strategists found that Brown was far more popular with the electorate than Blair. The opposition Conservatives also discovered this when they had to drop their initial campaign slogan "Vote Blair, get Brown" after their own research revealed that was precisely what many voters wanted. As the campaign creaked on, Milburn's pledges fell by the wayside and Labour instead focussed on the strength of the economy and how bad the opposition Tories would be. And as the economy took centre stage, so did Brown. Blair was virtually never seen without Brown at his side, as if clinging to the chancellor for his political life. Labour MPs are now busy reflecting very publicly on how much bigger their majority would have been if Blair had been replaced by Brown before the elections. Tellingly, Milburn swiftly announced following the elections that he would be leaving the government to spend more time with his family; many suspect he is more concerned about spending less time with an ascendant Brown. With a severely reduced majority and Brown looking stronger than ever, Blair's position looks distinctly uncomfortable. In the words of one Labour MP, Blair is a "dead man walking". Certainly Blair will need to dramatically change his style of confronting his own Labour MPs. For one thing the 40 or so hardcore rebels among labour backbenchers have all held on to their seats, so they can now inflict a defeat on the government at will. Consequently, many of the reforms he has pledged will have to be discarded or watered down, further diminishing the prime minister's authority. But the real change is that both the prime minister and the chancellor are well aware that Blair's future is now in Brown's hands rather than his own; after all, if Brown resigned at any point, Blair would be finished. But Brown won't want to pull the trigger just yet. The government is committed to holding a referendum on the new European constitution next year and it is possible that it will end up losing. Brown, less enthusiastic than the prime minister on Europe, will be reluctant to lead what could very well be a failed campaign. Nevertheless, Blair's frailty is likely to bring forward events faster than either of them would wish. For the Conservatives, once seen as the natural party of government, the elections cruelly showed that they are still far short of being a genuine contender. Under their leader Michael Howard, the conservatives did record a modest gain of 33 seats. But their share of the vote at 32 per cent had barely altered from that of the two previous elections. Perhaps wisely, Howard pre-empted the inevitable leadership speculation which was followed by announcing he would step down once new rules were in place to elect a new party leader. Unusually for British party leader, Howard appeared to show some humility in his resignation speech. "I've said that if people don't deliver then they go," he said. "And for me delivering meant winning the elections." Howard's supporters will claim that he played a weak hand well. And there is some truth to that. Howard managed to re-impose discipline on his party after years of infighting. He also added a cutting edge to parliamentary debate, something that had been conspicuously absent under his inept predecessor, Ian Duncan Smith. But the Tories still suffered from being old-fashioned and a lack of innovation, having seen much of their agenda co-opted by Blair. Much of their campaign focussed -- yet again -- on tax cuts and immigration; to many voters the former seemed tired while the latter seemed downright nasty. And Howard himself looked opportunistic and muddled by branding Blair a liar over Iraq while being forced to admit that he still supported the war. The Conservatives' most immediate problem is finding a leader to replace Howard. The front runner, right-winger David Davies is popular with the party's grassroots but is virtually unknown to the public. But all the other potential candidates are even more obscure. The party will then need to consider whether it should try and recapture the centre ground or whether it should lurch ever more rightwards in an effort to differentiate itself from Labour. One thing that won't work is the "one more heave" approach, which suggests that it should maintain the same course and wait for Labour to slip up. But in the absence of any fresh ideas, this is the approach the Tories are most likely to adopt. The Liberal Democrats are the one party with no leadership concerns -- with a gain of 11 seats for a total of 62, the likeable Charles Kennedy seems assured of his position at least until the next elections. But it was hardly the dramatic breakthrough party officials were hoping for, and, considering the Liberal Democrats were the only major party to oppose the war on Iraq, they should have done better. The Lib Dems much-vaunted "decapitation strategy" of unseating senior conservatives also failed dismally. Despite focussing its campaign resources on these seats, in many of them their share of the vote actually went down. This points to the central problem facing the Lib Dems; that its election campaign required it to be both to the right and to the left of Labour simultaneously. The seats which it is closest to gaining are Conservative-held marginals where it needs to appeal to Conservative voters, but the party itself appears to be decisively to the left of Labour, not only on Iraq, but on law and order, immigration and public services. The party now needs to decide whether to continue to try and appeal to disaffected centre-right voters or to move more decisively to the left to attract the growing numbers of ex-Labour voters. Another upset was George Galloway's victory in London's Bethnal Green for the anti-war Respect Party. Having been expelled from the Labour Party for his comments during the Iraq war, Galloway was standing against Oona King, a staunch supporter of Blair and the invasion of Iraq. While Galloway's victory might have been a shock to Labour, it shouldn't have been a surprise. The seat has a large Muslim population who are furious about Iraq and with whom Galloway has a natural rapport. Perhaps the biggest questions facing Britain's parties since the elections are over the electoral process itself. Turnout might have been up on the last elections but at 62 per cent was still historically low. The prevailing mood among the public wasn't just hostile to Blair but to politicians as a whole. And, as in other recent elections, the campaigns had virtually no effect in how Britons voted. The parties' campaigns, it would seem, only succeeded in turning people off rather than turning them out to vote. This is hardly a new discovery, but the parties still resort to the same old methods, largely because they know the other parties will too. And if, as many now predict, Blair goes sooner rather than later, many will be asking how it is that Britain's electoral system delivered a lame duck prime minister who has so obviously lost the trust and support of the public. If politicians don't find an answer for that, it will be the political system itself that will be brought into question.
