LEAD, DON'T BEG:

It will be a hard night for Blair on May 5: In years of polling voters, I have never found the public mood in Britain so disgruntled and disillusioned (Frank Luntz, 4/04/05, Times of London)

THE DAYS of Labour’s three-figure majority may be coming to an end — at least if the voters of Milton Keynes North East are any indication.

Last week BBC Two’s Newsnight brought me over from America to examine the mood of the voters. I studied at Oxford during the 1987 election and was a political commentator during the 1997 and 2001 elections, and never have I seen voters so disgruntled as now. In the past, only a small segment of the population has complained about having to choose the lesser of three evils. This time they all seem to be, and they are not happy about it.

Newsnight gave me a camera crew and a mission: find the voters in a marginal constituency that best represents what might happen on May 5. I chose Milton Keynes North East because it returned a Conservative during the Thatcher years, but embraced Tony Blair in 1997 and 2001. It is also one of the few seats where the Liberal Democrats control the local council and can seriously contest the constituency.

The 30 people who gathered to talk politics for three hours were undecided voters who represented a fair cross-section of the electorate. In the 2001 election, nine had voted Labour, eight had backed the Conservatives, eight the Liberal Democrats, and one voted for the United Kingdom Independence Party. Four did not vote — three of them said they would have voted Labour in 2001.

Although they came from diverse political backgrounds, our 30 undecideds agreed on much more than you would expect. All the party leaders spin. All say what they think voters want to hear. No one is addressing the issues that concern them.

The big loser of the evening, was Mr Blair. He was called “liar”, “dishonest”, “promise breaker”, and “patronising” — and that was by his 2001 Labour supporters. The feeling of everyone was the same: incredibly high hopes when he came to office in 1997 and shattered expectations today.

The problem for Mr Blair, and why Labour could have its majority sliced in half, is that the more he struggles to lower public expectations, the more he sinks in people’s estimation. The swing voters overwhelmingly picked him as both the most likely party leader to cheat at golf (“he’ll do anything to win”), and also the leader that they would most trust to watch their daughter for a weekend — “his soft, gentle talk is patronising to us, but a nine-year-old would like it”.

The more Mr Blair tells voters he is listening, the more convinced they are that he is not. The more he claims he is not courting popularity, the more they assume he is just spinning. Mr Blair, if you read these words . . . stop.

He's lucky in that his opponents are completelt unprincipled, but he ought to have learned from watching George W. Bush that folks don't much mind disagreeing with you so long as they trust you.

Posted by Orrin Judd at April 4, 2005 5:43 PM