Time to Deliver.(British election)

The lights go down, saxophones shriek and James Brown screams: "Wo! I feel good!" So begins "Feelgood," Alistair Beaton's lacerating stage satire of British politics circa 2001. It's about a prime minister-- D.L., he's called--obsessed with presentation and keeping his job. D.L. (for "Divine Leader") is aided by a spin doctor so malevolent that he arranges the murder of a journalist who has uncovered a genetically modified foods scandal that could destroy D.L., his government and his party, New Labour. "Feelgood" spares no one. D.L. is a craven phony. He's surrounded by an unprincipled praetorian guard. Even D.L.'s cherished "Third Way," his political middle course between hard-edged capitalism and softheaded socialism, is mercilessly ridiculed. It gets worse.

There's the scary suggestion that the electorate sees through D.L.'s charade. "People are getting hacked off," says the journalist Liz to the spin doctor. "They're beginning to notice."

All fiction, of course. In the real world, as "Feelgood" was delighting London audiences, the offstage targets of Beaton's lampoon have been coasting to victory at the polls on June 7. In real life, Prime Minister Tony Blair and his party have often disappointed and sometimes dismayed Britons. But they have managed the economy well enough to roll over the hapless Conservative opposition, echoing Labour's impressive 1997 win that ended 18 years of Tory rule in Britain. Blair II is a stunning electoral moment for Britain, marking Labour's restoration as a credible, modern party of government. "For 25 years right-wing ideologues have said that social justice had to be sacrificed in order to sustain a virile economy," says Labour M.P. Denis MacShane. "Blair has proven them wrong. Margaret Thatcher can finally retire."

Not to mention Helmut Kohl. Blair II, like Blair I before it, is also a timely boost for the European center left. Since Labour's victory in 1997, followed by Lionel Jospin's in France and Gerhard Schroder's in Germany, the center left has lost some ground across Europe. In 1998 only two of the 15 European Union countries, Spain and Ireland, had center-right governments. Today Italy, Austria and Luxembourg--and, to a lesser extent, Belgium, where power is shared--are also in center- right hands. The left continues to dominate the intellectual arguments on public policy. But to stay in power, as Blair has, the left must contend with "different political constraints," says Laurent Bouvet, editor of Revue Socialiste in Paris. Now, he says, the left's thinking is necessarily "more pragmatic"--attuned not just to election but re- election. Facing elections of their own next year, Jospin's Socialists and Schroder's Social Democrats will show just how tuned in they are.

Labour's return to power was never in doubt. But the sheer size of it, judging from the polls, confirms that Blair's first term demonstrated that his electoral success is built on more than a national yearning to put the Tories out to pasture: it established that New Labour, as revitalized and restructured by Blair and his fellow modernizers, can run an economy and not just a party. Blair's first government was hardly problem-free. His party's left wing believed he should use his huge majority to move left; he resisted. He was politically damaged--or so it seemed--by dismal public services, a fuel-tax protest and a foot- and-mouth epidemic that led to the slaughter of more than 3 million farm animals. In the end, however, the voters seemed prepared to reward him for sound economic management--and to believe him when he said that for Labour there was no returning to the bad old days of paralyzing strikes or spending splurges followed by economic collapse.

Recasting Labour's image was foremost on Blair's agenda four years ago. He quickly set a Labour-means-business tone by granting the Bank of England government-free control of interest-rate policy, by eschewing new taxes and by agreeing to stick to the previous Conservative government's spending limits for two years. By moving Labour to the center, Blair was determined to put the Tories out of business. Fifteen years ago it would have been almost inconceivable that a Labour leader could actually manage to do it, as Blair seems to have, at least for the time being. Equally inconceivable would have been the sort of declaration he made last week in launching Labour's "business manifesto." "It is Labour alone," he said, "that is capable of providing the economic platform that business so badly needs."

Blair's center-left comrades on the Continent have never been completely at ease with him. Their policies tend to be to the left of his. Their links to unions remain stronger. They pour more public money into (generally superior) public services. Their idea of big government is slightly grander, measured by government spending as a percentage of GDP (France, 53 percent; Germany, 48 percent, and Britain, 41 percent). They resented the fact that, if only by getting there first, Blair was crowned in the media as Europe's dominant Third Way leader. Of course, that was before the very term ...