BRING BACK I.D.S.:

Tony--and Tacky: Election-bound Britain gets the "TB-GB" heebie-jeebies. (PETER STOTHARD, April 13, 2005, Opinion Journal)

[T]he government still rides high in the polls--about three points ahead. And Britain's parliamentary election system gives Labour a massive advantage, not through the current scandal of corrupt postal voting by some of its Asian councillors, but because of its dominance of all cities, including their depopulated and not yet redistricted hearts. In order to put its new leader, Michael Howard, securely into Ten Downing Street, the Conservatives need an 11-point lead. Even their best poll result since Tony Blair took power in 1997 would put them some 100 seats behind Labour.

Mr. Howard's predecessor, Ian Duncan-Smith, the White House's favourite Conservative, was so unpopular that he never even got to fight an election. Before him, the Tories experimented with their onetime wonderboy, William Hague. Trounced by Mr. Blair in 2001, he has since stepped back to write the life of a more successful boy-politician, William Pitt.

All three have come from the right of the party--which is a problem for those party strategists who see the only realistic chance of a Tory return to power through some kind of coalition, even after a 2009 election, with the Liberal Democrats. Michael Howard has tried to encourage the left side of his party by disavowing deep cuts in tax and spending. For the rest he has his record of being a tough home secretary, with responsibility for domestic security, when his party was last in power. In his wilderness years, while his party experimented with inexperience, he formed a foundation to fortify the Anglo-American alliance. Despite attracting hostility from President Bush's aides last year by claiming he would have cast an antiwar vote had he known there were no Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, he is a deep-dyed ally of the U.S.

Why should we prefer liberal "conservatives" to a conservative liberal?

Posted by Orrin Judd at April 13, 2005 12:00 AM