Seeking Center Ground.(World Affairs)(Tony Blair's politics)

Byline: Stryker McGuire; With Sophie Grove In London

Tony Blair seems to have disappeared from British political life. But his unique brand of politics lives on.

Where's Tony? The search for former British prime minister Tony Blair hasn't been enshrined in a children's book or computer game yet, but don't rule it out. Seldom has a world-class politician seemed to disappear so swiftly and without a trace. Since he resigned from office in June after 10 glittering and controversial years in power, the leader once hailed as one of Britain's most influential postwar prime ministers has become a nonperson. TONY WHO? was the headline over a recent column in The Guardian by Simon Hoggart, who compared Blair's fate to that of a disgraced Politburo member airbrushed out of a May Day parade photo by the Kremlin in Soviet times. "Now," Hoggart wrote, "Mr. Blair is either in Mexico with an ice pick through his skull, or worse, trying to bring peace to the Middle East."

The correct answer is the latter (as a special international envoy on behalf of the United Nations, the European Union, the United States and Russia). But don't let the Blair jokes fool you. It's true that at the Conservatives' annual conference last week the words "heir to Blair" no longer passed the lips of those who once upon a time hopefully compared their young, dynamic leader, David Cameron, to the ex prime minister. It's true, too, that Blair seemed to have been erased from the memory banks of Labour delegates at their conference the week before; Brown made a single, fleeting reference to you-know-who in his big speech. Nonetheless, the idea that Blair has been consigned to the dustbin of history is misleading. With rumors flying that Brown might call a snap election in a few weeks, whisper it: Blair is dead, but Blairism -- the political ideology with which he ruled his party and his country -- lives on.

Indeed, Blair's politics live on most vividly in Brown himself. It's uncanny the way the new prime minister has both killed Blair and shamelessly assumed his mantle. He's amassed impressive popular support as the anti-Blair with a serious, nonflashy style that sets him apart from Blair, whose presentational pizzazz came to be deplored as spin by an electorate that turned angry after the invasion of Iraq. And yet, like Blair before him, he's continued to develop hard-line policies on such issues as immigration and crime. He's proposed locking up for five years anybody in illegal possession of a gun, for example. Such measures help to tighten ...