Category: Old Dish

That’s Tony Blair’s share of the vote. The Tories got 32.3 percent. The difference? 2.9 percent of the vote. The difference in seats? 158 in a 600 + parliament. Labour was saved by the electoral system.

NRO’s post-mortem on the British election is a sane and insightful one. I agree with almost all of it. But it is weird to read in NRO the following sentence:

[The Tories] have the leisure, the time, and the stability to rethink their distinctly timid economic strategy and to invest in building and selling a new one rooted in limited government.

So NRO now supports limited government? So why have they not blasted consistently at George W. Bush’s complete abandonment of limited government and fiscal balance? As I have written before, Tony Blair’s incremental increase in government spending is pure Thatcherism compared to Bush’s big government explosion. Wouldn’t it be great if NRO actually used the same principles it deploys against Blair and Howard against Bush? And don’t give me the excuse of occasional pathetic worries about Bush’s spending. If a Democrat had Bush’s record, NRO’s assault on him would be daily and relentless. Draw your own conclusions.

The Tory leader returned the party to a normal opposition party. But he doesn’t have the chops to be PM. Here’s the Guardian’s list of potential successors, one of whom might be a future prime minister, after Labour’s Gordon Brown.

ANOTHER ONE: By now, we’re used to finding out that many of the most ferocious homophobes on the right have gay offspring – Phyllis Schlafly, Alan Keyes, Pete Knight. Now we discover that others are actually tortured gay men themselves. I feel bad for the mayor of Spokane. I don’t like the witch-hunts of these conflicted, desperate, if often malicious people. But the Roy Cohn syndrome of closeted gay men persecuting others is, alas, a real one. And it reaches far beyond Spokane into the highest echelons of the Republican party.

The last minute CW was wrong: Tony Blair has barely survived a brutal vote of no confidence by the British public. Yes, the war was a major reason. But it’s important to understand that hostility to Blair was not simply about the decision to go to war, but how he did it, how he appeared to have been less than forthright, and how this characterological duplicity reflected broader discontent with his management style on domestic issues as well. But this was not a victory for the Tories either. They’re back as a real opposition party and now have a real chance of forming the next government. But they failed to articulate a real, national theme or an argument about the future of Britain; and they barely increased their share of the vote over 2001. They gained by default; and witnessed real gains from the fiercely leftist anti-war Liberal Democrats. Blair’s mandate is risible: as I write, he will form a government with a mere 36 percent of the vote. That’s a lower level of popular support than any parliamentary majority in history. The pressure on him to move aside will now grow. I doubt he will survive the next few months of internecine Labour warfare. And that may be to the good. A more left-wing Brown government will give the British public a real choice in the next few years – providing the Tories regain their small government philosophy. (More commentary below – I was live-blogging the results as they came in last night.)

QUOTE OF THE DAY: “Mr Blair, this defeat is for Iraq and the other defeats that New Labour has received this evening are for Iraq. All the people you have killed and all the loss of life have come back to haunt you and the best thing that the Labour Party can do is sack you tomorrow morning.” – George Galloway, creep extraordinaire, basking in an amazing victory over the official Labour candidate. No result was more depressing than this one. And no result more humiliating for Blair. He must feel shattered. And the knives are out. Remember: Blair remains prime minister only at the behest of his own party. Gordon Brown could be prime minister as soon as a critical mass of chastened and ornery Labour MPs decide he should be. I’d say the chances of Blair surviving more than a few more months are low.

CPAP UPDATE: It’s been a while since I spoke about my sleep apnea and the use of a CPAP machine to help me sleep. I’ve now clocked 1,158 hours of sleep with CPAP (the machine measures the hours). Have things changed? Short answer: yes. I used to feel exhausted in the late afternoons and would take a regular nap. I have napped once in the four months I have been on CPAP. My energy level has increased – dramatically at first and then more slowly. I’ve added three days of cardio to my weight-training gym routine. My boyfriend is much happier at night. Are there drawbacks? Yes. I have a full face-mask and in the morning my face is deeply creased with its marks (not too pretty). It wears off after a shower and an hour or so, but there’s a dent in the middle of my forehead which seems to be semi-permanent. The velcro on the mask is also subject to wear and tear and it has come off in the night a couple of times. I don’t find the humidifying tank very useful and have stopped using it altogether. Occasionally, the mask leaks air and it takes a while to fix the misaligned rubber. My boyfriend has sometimes found himself being blasted with cold air over the pillow. Bedtime intimacy are not so easy when you look like you’re on life-support. But these are quibbles compared with the broader quality-of-life improvement. You may have noticed I have been a recidivist on my bid to cut down on blogging. Well, I don’t blog at night any more (I sleep and hang with the BF); but my energy level is high enough to allow me to blog, write my usual columns and work on my book, which is progressing slowly but roughly on target. I’ll get some bloodwork soon to check on my HIV viral levels. But I can’t help but feel that my immune system is stronger as well. Here’s an email I got yesterday that tells a similar story:

I’ve been a long time reader of your blog, in fact I’m also a contributor. You take a lot of slings and arrows for us homos (my partner and I live in Minneapolis). Anyway, I wanted to send you a note and thank you for a life-changing thing for me and my partner. Thanks to your blog I went and had myself checked out for sleep apnea. I snored a lot and my partner Justin and I rarely ever slept in the same bed. After reading about your experience the difference the CPAP made for you I went and had an overnight sleep study and was fitted with a CPAP.
I describe the experience to people as living life in a haze, only you don’t know there’s a haze you just think that’s how things are supposed to be. Then someone comes along and clears up the haze and you get to see the world like its supposed to be. It’s been absolutely amazing. Justin and I are much, much better and life seems great. I have the renewed energy to do things I didn’t have the energy to before (like make my documentary on gay hockey players).

Ah, gay hockey players. If you are constantly tired, fall asleep often, and have a bed-partner who complains about snoring or cessation of breathing, see your doc. Here endeth the health advisory.

Oddly enough, London seems to be the Tories’ strongest region. The Guardian’s blog suggests why: angst about crime and immigration on the right and anti-war sentiment on the left. Blair was caught in the middle.

This could be the most depressing result so far. Labour has suffered two big defeats in safe Labour seats from rebels in their ranks. One in Wales where the national Labour party insisted on an all-woman list of candidates. A local male candidate ran as an independent Labour candidate and won an astonishing victory. Galloway also seems to have knocked off a key Labour candidate. As a supporter of the war, I’m not going to join Glenn Reynolds in blaming media bias for the analysis that the war hurt Blair. Of course it hurt Blair; and it’s Glenn’s bias to deny it. Or rather, it was the sense that the government wasn’t honest with the people about its rationale that hurt Blair. Blair’s dubious honesty and reliability were key factors in this defeat, and those factors involved domestic policy as well. But the war brought those worries to the fore. I cannot see how he can recover from this personal indictment from the people of Britain.

Still confusing. I’m bummed that my friend Nick Boles lost Hove by a mere 420 votes. The Tories are doing better in London than expected; but the picture is still so varied, the ultimate result is hard to predict. A Labour majority of 60 or so? At his own acceptance speech, Blair looks shattered, almost on the verge of tears. He may continue as prime minister. But he’s deeply wounded. He won’t last a full term, I’d say. He may not last the year.

If you’re a Britophile, the BBC livecast on C-SPAN is excellent entertainment. The results are very weird so far: different patterns in different regions; different results in Labour-Tory fights than in Labour-Lib-Dem battles and than in Tory-Lib Dem contests. I’d be amazed if the 7 percent swing against Labour continues nationally; the odds on Labour losing are still small. But if I were Michael Howard, I’d be ebullient right now. If I were Blair, I’d be worrying. Remember that a good 70 Labour MPs are anti-Blair; if the prime minister’s majority goes beneath that, the pressure on him to go will be intense. Too soon to say definitively, but so far, Blair’s continued premiership is now in severe doubt. I just saw Tony Blair’s face. It was fixed in a horrifying, death-rattle grin. He knows it could be a long, white-knuckled night.

The latest Peterborough result is another 7 percent swing against Blair. The Tory victory against the Liberal Democrats in Torbay is also very bad news for Blair. If a swing of 6 or 7 percent against Labour continues, then Labour could actually fail to win this election. I repeat: Labour might not win at this point. This is shaping up to be a huge blow against the prime minister. Developing hard …

The first big actual surprise has been in the London constituency, Putney, a tight Conservative-Labour battleground district. The Tories won the seat from Labour on a 6.2 percent swing. It’s worth reiterating: Don’t trust the national exit polls. The constituency-by-constituency battle is what matters. The Putney result suggests a real, big gain for the Tories. But Putney is just one seat. Nevertheless, my gut instinct a week ago may well be right. If Blair’s majority goes below 50, he’ll have to go. This is looking like a real Tory success. Yes, I’m a partisan. I respect and like Blair; but I’m a Tory at heart.