And take that wretched voting system with you!
At times like these, one feels sorry for the owners of British off-licenses. I don't imagine that the champagne was flying off the shelves after last week's Westminster election. The Conservatives won more than 40 extra seats but couldn't shift their share of the vote from the lamentable 33% they won in 2001. The Lib Dems increased their overall vote but didn't gain significantly more MPs. Labour, although re-elected with an eminently respectable majority of 67, saw their share of the vote slump to just 36%.
Micheal Howard has already announced that he will resign. Tony Blair has intimated that he "won't go on forever" and Charlie Kennedy remains one bad bender away from getting to spend more time with his family. These are strange times indeed.
But of all the parties, it is Labour which has the most to ponder following last week's vote. By shedding 6 points from their 2001 score, Labour achieved the lowest ever share of the vote for a winning party. Back in 1992 John Major took a positively muscular 43% of the vote yet ended up only 20 seats ahead, just within the bounds of what is known as "a workable majority". Even the much maligned Neil Kinnock, presiding over Labour's fourth, and most excruciating, defeat in a row, managed 38%.
Landslide Tony has led Labour to one of its worst results in recent history. Yet, there he is, grinning inanely outside Number 10, blatheirng on about the brave new world which will be ushered in during his third term in office. He can consider himself lucky on two counts: firstly, that the main opposition party is still so widely reviled in the country and secondly, that Britain has a quite absurdly unfair voting system which allowed a party that took only 36% of the vote to win more than half of the seats.
Perhaps, given his party's deep and abiding unpopularity, Conservative leader Micheal Howard played his cards rather well. He ran hard on immigration and asylum in order to mobilise his base and it worked. The Tories squeezed dozens more seats out of a roughly static vote. It was ugly politics, but it was smart politics too.
But, by pandering to the worst prejudices of white Britain, Howard negated any chance he had of building a winning coalition. For Blair this meant that the middle ground was his for the taking. It was a matter of fighting another enemy: apathy. The Did Not Vote party, after its crushing 41% share of the vote last time slipped back a little to 40%. But still, it was an impressive performance.
In fighting disaffection, of both working-class and middle-class voters, Blair has become a liability to his party rather than an asset. In the past, Blair's message to his own party was something along the lines of "OK, I don't like you and you don't like me, but you need me to get elected." No more.
For many British voters, Tony Blair means Iraq, means quagmire, means deception. The war itself, while very important, is also a touchstone issue for the wider matter of Blair's integrity (I can't believe I've just put those two words next to each other).
This is the man to whom Gordon Brown said a few months ago "There is nothing that you could ever say to me now that I could ever believe." How would you feel if someone who you had worked with for 20 years said that about you? His colleague's verdict may end up being his political epitath. Criticism hits home harder from colleagues than from opponents. Micheal Howard, lest we forget, has "something of the night about him."
Blair's distant relationship with the truth, best exemplified by his actions in early 2003 as war loomed, will haunt him always. Iraq will be to Blair what Suez was to Eden, what Munich was to Chamberlain. The war will poison his political obituary. History will damn him as either a fool or a nave, perhaps even as both.
The fact that such a discredited man could be returned to power is an accident of the British voting system, rather than a reflection on the British people's judgement. If the UK had an even remotely proportional system then no party would have a majority in the Commons. The most likely outcome would be a Lib-Lab coalition with, one would hope, the troops returning to their families and Blair going off to spend more time with his lawyers.
But, thanks to Britain's dinosaur, pre-mass numeracy voting system, this didn't happen. Centuries ago, our Arab friends invented these wonderful things called numbers, they're very useful for a variety of things, including voting. Marking anything with an "X", be it a contract or a ballot paper, is not sometihng of which to be proud.
Thanks to this joke of an electoral device, Blair is free to limp on, blithely telling anyone who'll listen that he's got four years left in him. But he has been so damaged by last Thursday's results that I would be (unpleasantly) surprised if he manages to hobble through to 2007, let alone 2009.
Start counting the days, Mr. 36%.