WHY IS THERE A TORY PARTY?:

Campaign in Britain stays clear of ‘Europe’: 3 principal parties, despite differences, prefer other issues (Alan Cowell, April 11, 2005, The New York Times

At the start of Britain's election campaign, for all the daily sound and fury, there is one word that has barely been heard. Call it the E-word.

Europe, that great landmass just offshore of this isle, has barely drawn a mention since Prime Minister Tony Blair finally announced last week after months of pre-campaign campaigning that Britain would go to the polls, as long expected, on May 5.

True, this will be an election with many imponderables. Blair himself, for instance, has already said that he will not run for a fourth if he wins a third straight term for the first time in the Labour Party's 80-year history. That, in turn, means that a vote for Blair in this election will almost inevitably mean a vote for someone else - most likely his finance chief and main rival, Gordon Brown - at some stage in the future.

It is an election, too, in which many analysts depict the outcome as dependent on an odd blend of nitty-gritty issues such as health care, crime and jobs coupled with a far more elusive sense of trust: Blair lost it among many voters during the Iraq war and Michael Howard, the insurgent opposition leader, has yet to recover it after his earlier days as a hard-line and often unpopular minister in the days before the Conservatives lost power in 1997.

Indeed, unveiling a series of posters last week, the Labour Party specifically highlighted the question of who they would trust more: Blair and Brown or Howard and his finance chief, Oliver Letwin.

But in marked contrast to the previous campaign in 2001, no one has so far ventured too close to the political quagmire represented by Britain's relationship with the European Union - potentially the counterbalance to Blair's close relationship with successive U.S. administrations but one that more resembles a tripwire.

A conservative party that can't figure out to oppose the transfer of national sovereignty to the Franco-Germans isn't worthy of the title, much less people's votes.

Posted by Orrin Judd at April 11, 2005 12:00 AM