THE MASOCHISM CAMPAIGN.(Saturday)(Book Review)

Not long before making a series of visits to No. 10 Downing Street, I was reading the novel that everyone in London seemed to be poring over in the cafes and on the benches in St. James's Park--Ian McEwan's "Saturday," which is set on February 15, 2003, the day of the worldwide antiwar demonstrations. The central character is a middle-aged neurosurgeon named Henry Perowne. He is prosperous, fortunate in his wife and two children, happy, yet haunted by the onset of middle age; and although he is not especially political, he is pained and ambivalent about Tony Blair's support of the American-led invasion of Iraq. At one point, Perowne recalls meeting Blair. As a member of the Royal College of Surgeons, he'd been invited to the opening of the Tate Modern, where he and his wife, Rosalind, were among four thousand guests. Perowne wanders into a huge gallery and suddenly finds himself next to Blair, who is, as ever, eager to shake hands, to forge a connection.

"I really admire the work you're doing," Blair says. "In fact, we've got two of your paintings hanging in Downing Street. Cherie and I adore them." Clearly, Blair has taken Perowne to be one of the Tate's artists, and, after thinking it through, Perowne decides on honesty.

"You're making a mistake," he says.

"And, and on that word, there passed through the Prime Minister's features for the briefest instant a look of sudden alarm, of fleeting self-doubt," McEwan writes. "A hairline fracture had appeared in the assurance of power."

To follow British politics these past weeks, to watch Blair campaign for a third term--Election Day is May 5th--is to witness a politician putting himself in the way of any audience, any camera, anyone who will have him. His aides call it "the masochism campaign." The punishment is daily and takes many forms. During a televised meet-the-voters session in Coventry, Blair's declaration that he had improved the National Health Service was answered by Mrs. Valerie Holsworth, who told him that she had so despaired of finding an available N.H.S. dentist that she'd used her husband's pliers to yank her own rotten teeth--four of them. As proof, she readily displayed her gums. Blair winced in sympathy. At a Downing Street press conference, a tabloid reporter reacted to the Government's proud announcement of a hike in the minimum wage by asking Blair, "Would you be willing to wipe someone's bottom for this 'higher' minimum wage?" And, at a lunchtime session at No. 10 with British journalists, I heard a reporter say that Blair had appeared on the cover of Attitude, a magazine much like Out, which led him to ask the Prime Minister, "Are you a gay icon?" In every case, one saw the "hairline fracture in the assurance of power," the Halloween rictus, a practiced yet futile attempt to mask embarrassment or anger with a smile that hopes to project sincerity, patience, and (the essential category of pollsters) likability.

The masochism campaign is a kind of political rope-a-dope, the idea being that through constant exposure to Blair's kindly endurance, his lucid, if canned, explanations, the electorate will eventually weary of its lingering anger and distrust--primarily over Blair's unwavering support of George W. Bush--and will come around to conceding that the Conservatives, under the forgettable Michael Howard, have little to offer but fear-mongering on issues like asylum-seeking immigrants from Asia and Eastern Europe, and that the left-leaning Liberal Democrats are still a marginal party in the House of Commons promoting, as one Blair aide airily put it, "the ideology of bicyclists."

In a sense, after eight years of crisis and grating propinquity, Blair has to revive the notion of his own charm. When he came to power, in 1997, as the standard-bearer of New Labour, he ended eighteen years of Tory rule and the distinct possibility that Labour would never head a government again. Blair did not possess quite the glamour of a Kennedy, but, compared with his managerial predecessor, John Major, he was positively vibrant, promising a progressive revival as thorough as Margaret Thatcher's conservative revolution. He was just forty-three, the youngest Prime Minister since the Napoleonic Wars. His majority in the House of Commons was the biggest since 1935. He became the first Labour Party premier ever to last two consecutive terms, winning votes not just among the urban elites and the urban poor, the Labour base, but among traditional Tory voters in the suburbs of Middle England. Now, despite a rudderless opposition, Blair will be relieved if he wins a third term with a less gaudy majority in the Commons than he has enjoyed. His campaign's only anxiety is a sullen apathy among Labour voters. The Tories point to the 1970 campaign, when Harold Wilson's Labour Government held a decisive lead only to be dumped from office by the Tory Edward Heath.