How Tony Blair Won

IT WAS A SATURDAY, MARCH 15, AND Alastair Campbell, Tony Blair's press secretary, knew that he had only a few days of freedom left. At any moment, John Major would call a general election, and Campbell's life would not be his own. He grabbed the chance to go to a soccer match, and bumped into Stuart Higgins, the editor of The Sun, Rupert Murdoch's tabloid with a circulation of 3.9 million.

It is an article of faith in political Britain that The Sun can make or break a politician. In the 1992 election, the paper ran a vicious campaign against Neil Kinnock, then Labour's leader; when John Major came from behind to victory, the tab crowed IT'S THE SUN WOT WON IT. Since becoming leader of the party in 1994, Blair had courted Murdoch assiduously, hoping to get The Sun's endorsement. But Blair also knew that the paper and its proprietor were dead set against European economic integration--much more so than Blair or his party.

That Saturday afternoon, Higgins had a proposal for Campbell: would Blair write a piece for Monday's paper on Europe? Normally, Campbell or his deputy, Tim Allan, would knock out 600 words of what they called "Sunspeak" under Blair's name. This time, Blair spent Sunday morning at his house in the London district of Islington, writing a piece in longhand. It groveled. Though it didn't dismantle Labour's position on Europe, it was full of the required Sunspeak: "I am a British patriot," declared Blair, in language that no Labour leader had used for years. That was enough. At midmorning on Monday, March 17, Major announced that the election would be May 1. At 4:30 that afternoon, traveling in a car with Blair to Gloucester, Campbell got a call from Higgins on his cellular phone: The Sun would endorse Labour the next day.

In hindsight, Major and the Conservatives never recovered from that first decisive moment of the campaign. For the next six weeks, Labour did all it could to protect the momentum that The Sun had given it. The party went into a defensive crouch, playing rope-a-dope while the Tories punched themselves silly. Blair's landslide suggests that the result was preordained long before the campaign began. But not all went smoothly for Labour; a party less divided than the Tories could have landed some telling blows and possibly made the race much closer.

Both campaigns were state of the art. For Labour, the man in charge at the party's offices at London's Millbank Tower was Peter Mandelson, a 43-year-old member of Parliament. Sardonic and sharp, Mandelson had run Labour's campaigns since 1985, dedicating himself to building a Labour Party that was modern not just in its politics but in its campaigning. Fiercely loyal to Blair, Mandelson ran a tight ship. His staffers ("bunnies," because they popped up everywhere) were forbidden to speak to the press--or drink-- during the campaign.

On the Tory side, command was divided. Party Chairman Brian Mawhinney was nominally in charge. But the engine room was in the hands of Danny Finkelstein, 33, the head of political research for the party, and David Willetts, 41, a member of Parliament and a strategist so cerebral that he is known in British political circles as "Two Brains." Finkelstein's rise in Tory politics had been dramatic; he joined the party (partly at Willetts's urging) only in 1992, after fruitless years as an aide to maverick Social Democrat David Owen. Within months he was a key member of the Tory command.

Throughout the campaign, journalists wrote about the "Americanization" of the election. Superficially, there was something to it. Philip Gould, Mandelson's deputy in Millbank, had worked with Bill Clinton's team in 1992 and maintained close links with it. Stanley Greenberg, Bill Clinton's pollster in 1992, worked with consultants advising Labour; George Stephanopoulos made an appearance. The Tories, for their part, adopted a slogan--"Opportunity for all"--that was inspired by the big-tent politics of Jack Kemp.

The most influential foreigner in the campaign, though, was not an American at all but Andrew Sholl, an Australian who had worked for Paul Keating, the former Australian prime minister and MOB--or Mate of Blair. Sholl ran Labour's media-monitoring unit, a 10-person, 24-hour commando unit plugged into the airwaves, press and the Internet in a constant scan for gaffes and peccadilloes. And in fact, there's nothing particularly American these days about focus groups, polling, rapid-response teams, staying "on message" or the definition of wedge issues. The Conservative Party under Margaret Thatcher did all that long before Bill Clinton. Mandelson saw the Clinton team as friends, but that didn't mean they ran Labour's campaign: "They're a bit left-wing for me," Mandelson once muttered during a trip to Washington.

With The Sun's endorsement in the bag, and Labour sitting on a huge lead in the polls, the Tories attacked. Finkelstein and Willetts went after Labour at its weakest point: its association with the trade unions that had caused such havoc when the party had last been in office nearly two decades ago. The Tory line: Blair had cut a deal with the unions that promised them all kinds of goodies if Labour won in exchange for a low profile during the campaign. Finkelstein worked round the clock, ramping up stories for the press on the theme of "New Labour danger" until well into the night. Then he'd crash at the apartment he'd rented near the Conservative Central Office in Smith Square. ("Done Ramping," he christened his digs.) Over at Millbank, Tim Allan felt a wobble in Labour's position; the early attacks on the unions were hurting. But his worries were nothing compared with those of the Tories.

On March 26, Finkelstein heard a groan from his staff watching TV. The Sun was going to publish a picture of Piers Merchant, a married Tory M.P., making out on a park bench with a 17-year-old Soho nightclub hostess. The paper said (in classic Sunspeak) that the two had shared "nights of passion." The Merchant scandal came on top of a week of stories about Tory "sleaze." For three years, Tory M.P.s had been accused of taking cash from lobbyists in exchange for raising issues on the floor of Parliament. Every morning at 5:30, Finkelstein got back to the Tory War Room from Done Ramping to find a stack of newspapers full of nothing but sleaze.

Still, Labour was losing steam. Blair was on edge. By the third week of the campaign, he seemed wary of deviating from his inordinately bland and content-free scripted remarks. Blair's handlers packaged him in a protective bubble, safe from predators like real voters and reporters. On April 9 an ICM poll for The Guardian found that Labour's lead had dropped to 12 points. At his desk at Smith Square, Willetts was feeling almost cocky. Labour kept getting caught out; deciding, for example, that it was in favor of privatization, despite a thick paper trail of comments from party leaders deploring each and every one. Willetts began to call Mandelson's operation "the machine without a brain."

Blair knew that Labour--and his own campaigning--needed to get better. He'd never led a campaign before, but Labour sources say he had an incredibly steep learning curve. He'd call up officials and say, "It's not good enough this way; we'll do it this way from now on." Blair thought that the party had to give the country a reason for supporting it: "We need to grab this election by the scruff of its neck," he said to an aide.

On April 17, Blair went to Edinburgh for a speech. He had decided to break away from his too-scripted-looking appearances. Advisers gave him two sheets of paper with a message about the National Health Service on them. The rest was up to him. "Let it rip," Alastair Campbell told him. Blair went to his hotel room and practiced his spontaneity. In the hall, he covered the health stuff and then left the lectern to move about the stage. His radio mike failed. Blair's voice grew to fill the hall: "We are the party of aspiration and ambition... When the Labour Party was founded all those years ago, it was founded in the belief of two things above all else: justice and progress." He looked ahead to the election and said, "I stand here with a sense of humility and a sense of responsibility, but also with a sense of excitement." In an outburst of enthusiasm rare in the campaign, the crowd gave him a standing ovation. His wife, Cherie, joined him on-stage; they hugged each other, reported The Scotsman newspaper, "in that embarrassed way they have." Bull's-eye. "Blair unplugged," enthused Tim Allan.

By then the Conservatives had started to unravel. On April 15, Major had returned to his flat at 10 Downing Street with a handful of aides. As they often did at the end of the campaign day, they were winding down, having a drink--"laughing and giggling," as one of them said. The phone rang. Mawhinney told Major that John Horam, a minister for health, had openly defied the prime minister's policy that Britain should not rule out joining the proposed European Monetary Union, but should wait to see how EMU developed. In fact, hundreds of Tory candidates across the country were in open rebellion against Major's fence-straddling on EMU (which also happened to be Labour's policy). Major seemed unable to deal with the revolt.

Still, the Tories plugged away, telling the country that Britain was "booming." Labour knew that was the Tories' best card: "Each week, the perception of the economy grew stronger," said a Labour insider. The Tories had hopes that, despite their own divisions on Europe, Britain would think them better able to defend national interests in Brussels than Labour. And on April 22, they got some good news; a poll in the next day's Guardian had knocked Blair's lead down to 5 percent. Finkelstein spun away on his cell phone: "The doubtfuls are coming back. Trust and Europe are playing well on the doorstep, backed by a good economy. The fundamental laws of politics point in our direction."

Labour didn't panic. Greg Cook, the party's pollster at Millbank, had said all along that The Guardian's polls were suspect, and Labour's huge lead was soon reconfirmed. In the last week the party went negative; a charge by Blair that the Tories intended to abolish the state pension "knocked us sideways" said Sheila Gunn, Major's press secretary. The prime minister was furious, calling Blair and the Labour leadership "plain liars"-- not a word he uses often. At Smith Square, the finger-pointing began.

Election Day found Finkelstein at a pub near Central Office, knocking back a Diet Coke and salted peanuts a few hours before the polls would close. He knew the Conservatives had lost; but he thought the campaign had narrowed Labour's lead to 8 or 9 points. He felt OK about that.

Then came the exit polls. Tories fell one by one across the country. At Central Office a staffer sat on the steps, head in his hands. The men's room was filled with aides in tears. Michael Portillo, Major's defense minister and a likely candidate for the Tory leadership, lost his supposedly safe seat in suburban London. Portillo had been a consummate team player during the campaign. Just before dawn on Friday morning, he walked into Central Office, greeted by a roar of approval and applause. "That's when I nearly lost it," Finkelstein said later that day.

On election night, Blair and Mandelson were in their parliamentary districts in the northeast of England. After the counts, they flew south on separate chartered planes. Blair landed at Stansted Airport and took a call of congratulations from Clinton on his car phone. Then he headed for a rally at London's Royal Festival Hall. As dawn started to break, Blair spoke twice; once to the cheering crowds, once, quietly and privately, to a group of about 200 party workers. "It was very emotional," says one who was there. "There was a lot of tears, and a fierce pride in what we'd done." Mandelson headed straight to Millbank to take his 6 a.m. meeting, and stayed there until Blair entered Downing Street at lunchtime. Nearly 12 years after he'd joined the party organization, Peter Mandelson had got his man into power. He left Millbank, and went home to get on with the rest of his life.