When the other leaders of the G-8 nations arrive in England for their annual summit this week, they will be greeted by the famously toothy smile of British Prime Minister Tony Blair. They will switch on their smiles too, but mostly for show. Bill Clinton is stuck in the mire of the Lewinsky matter. Germany's Helmut Kohl is facing a September election he may not survive. Japan's Ryutaro Hashimoto is struggling to keep his government and his country's economy from collapsing. Boris Yeltsin is in poor health and is a political lame duck.
But Tony Blair? Make no mistake about it, that big smile is the real thing. He has just completed his first year in office, and by nearly every measurement, things could not be better. He is more popular now than when he won his landslide victory. His 72% approval rating in the polls is the highest first-year score for any British Prime Minister of either party since World War II. His Labour government is so far ahead of the opposition Tories in the national polls that the party of Margaret Thatcher, which dominated British politics for a generation, has almost disappeared as an effective political force. Blair is arguably the most successful politician on the face of the earth.
To cap off his year in office, Blair helped engineer a historic peace agreement in Northern Ireland and last week managed to reassert a British presence in Middle East politics by sponsoring a high-profile negotiation in London. The British economy is booming: the pound is up, and unemployment is down. Peace and prosperity. Who could ask for anything more? But just in case someone does, there's Britain's current boom in the arts. Whether it's movies like the The Full Monty, bands like Oasis and the Spice Girls, or designers like Stella McCartney, the hottest thing going these days seems to come from what is cloyingly known as "cool Britannia." And while Blair admits that this artistic blossoming was under way before he took office, he and his coterie of young advisers have relentlessly, even shamelessly, courted and promoted the hip as a way of announcing to the world that Britain is changing.
"Modernization" is the young Prime Minister's mantra. After Blair became leader of the Labour Party in 1994, he waged a bitter fight to reform it, moving it away from its tired socialist roots and forcing it to embrace elements of Thatcherism. As Prime Minister, he has embarked on a mission to modernize Britain and its politics. The grand design is not entirely clear. "He's not an ideologist," says Oxford University political scientist David Marquand, "but he wants an ideology. In a kind of intuitive way he knows what he's against and perhaps what he is for." Blair is utterly pragmatic. If it works, it's good, no matter whose idea it was. Blair has made no effort at disassembling the many reforms instituted by Thatcher and denounced at the time by Labour. So state industries remain privatized, unions are still reduced in power, businesses deregulated, and government spending held in check. That stance irritates Conservatives, who feel Blair is getting the credit they deserve. Blair, grumped the right-of-center Economist, is the "strangest Tory ever sold."