Tony's Second Chance; The crisis in Sudan gives Britain's prime minister a shot at redemption. Can he lead the world on a new moral crusade?(Cover Story)

Byline: Stryker McGuire (With Eve Conant in Washington, Tracy Mcnicoll in Paris, Ginanne Brownell in London, Stefan Theil in Berlin and Edward Pentin in Rome)

It's a long way from the beaches of Barbados to the killing fields of Darfur. But as Tony Blair vacationed at pop star Cliff Richard's Sugar Hill villa last week, the crisis in Sudan was very much on his mind. Far from gun-shy after his wounding experience over the Iraq war, when many saw him as a tool of U.S. policy, the British prime minister has come out blazing. Britain is the lead cash donor to Sudan. Striving to overcome the failures of Iraq, Blair has sought to assemble a multinational effort to get the Khartoum government either to stop the rape, pillaging and killing that has driven nearly 1.5 million people from their homes--or face the consequences, including, as a last resort, military intervention. "What is happening there is unacceptable," he told reporters before he set off on his holiday. "Of course we have a moral responsibility to do what we can."

This is familiar territory for Blair. In Kosovo, when he was new to his job, and then in Afghanistan, before he yielded to the gravitational pull of George W. Bush, Blair cut a fine figure as multilateralism's missionary, a champion of humanitarian intervention. Then came Iraq. To Blair's dismay--he acknowledged only a few weeks ago that he might have been wrong about Saddam Hussein's WMD arsenal--his reputation took a beating as postwar Iraq turned messier and messier. In Darfur, where as many as a million people could die by the end of the year, Blair has found a new cause. "Iraq was a particularly difficult situation for us," one of Blair's senior advisers told NEWSWEEK last week. "But hard cases make bad law. Don't assume that everything is going to go the way of Iraq from now on."

Such is the new confidence at 10 Downing Street. Liberated however provisionally from the yoke of Iraq now that Iraqis are in charge, Blair has a second chance to shine at home and abroad. His principal rival and presumed successor as Labour Party chief and perhaps as prime minister, Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown, has abandoned his behind-the-scenes challenge to Blair's leadership. The Labour backbench is less restive, saving its energy for the next general election, expected in the first half of 2005. Having pumped huge sums into public services since Labour's wins over the conservatives in 1997 and 2001, Blair's government now believes that its investment is beginning to pay off, especially in health and education. The public remains to be persuaded, according to polls. But with the Tories in seemingly terminal disarray, the voters have nowhere else to go. "Opposition?" sneers one Labour M.P. "What opposition?"

As that remark suggests, there's more than a whiff of overconfidence among Blair's foot soldiers. As a member of his brain trust put it last week, "Some of us are working on ideas [for the next decade], not simply to win elections but to reconfigure the country. The ambition for Labour is to be the 'New Deal' government that can lead the U.K. from one moment of capitalism to the next in a way that is humane." Blairites used to call that vision of progressive governance the "Third Way," in the halcyon days of the late 1990s. It wasn't much of a success then, and it's debatable whether it can be in the future. Some economists foresee an economic train wreck in the making, as Blair and Brown ratchet up spending to Franco-German levels while pretending to ...