Quotes of the Day

They do not always conduct themselves with the air of those deserving sympathy, but spare a thought, please, for those inky-fingered wretches, Britain's political journalists. Living and working in the most competitive media market on the planet, they feverishly search each week for fresh color on the London scene, divine earth-shattering significance from what might seem unimportant trifles, discover and celebrate new big beasts in the political jungle. And when events inconveniently fail to match their predictions, they dust themselves off and go at it again.

So it was last week, which started with a widespread assumption that Tony Blair, Prime Minister since 1997, was facing a crisis. The House of Commons was to vote on two measures, both of which, it was thought, might see his government defeated, despite the Labour Party's thumping majority in the lower chamber. Meanwhile, Gordon Brown, Blair's Chancellor of the Exchequer, partner, rival and anointed successor, was rumbling away, giving speeches that were not even barely concealed as the outline of the themes of his own future premiership. And Blair's deeply unpopular adventure in support of the U.S. invasion of Iraq was once more winning the sort of headlines that have plagued him for nearly three years — this time, turning on videotapes of the alleged maltreatment of Iraqi civilians by British soldiers. Time to cue up the latest round of predictions that Blair's long domination of British political life was nearing an ignominious close.

Alas for our scribbling friends, it was not to be. Though Blair himself was stuck in South Africa by a malfunctioning plane, a controversial measure compelling those applying for a new passport to also get an identity card passed the House comfortably. Two days later, so did an equally contested plan to establish a criminal offense of "glorifying terrorism." At the end of the week, Blair was still in 10 Downing Street, Brown was still his next-door neighbor, and London's journalists were left wondering how they would keep their readers' interest in the longest-running soap opera in politics.

And yet, and yet … Though the Prime Minister may again have emulated Mark Twain and disappointed those who have announced his demise, the Blair era is indeed slowly coming to an end. He has said that he will not run for a fourth term in office. Given that Brown will need a fair chance to make his mark with the electorate before an election — one must take place no later than May 2010 — Blair is likely to be gone within two years. So it is not unreasonable to imagine what British politics will be like without him. And once you start down that line of inquiry, you come up with some surprising answers — ones that have an application beyond Britain's gray skies.

The bald facts of the case are these: Blair will be succeeded by Brown, no matter that Labour politicians pay lip service to the idea of a leadership contest. But that doesn't guarantee Brown a long tenancy in Downing Street. If Labour loses the next election, David Cameron, 39, the new, fresh-faced leader of the opposition Conservative Party, will collect the keys to No. 10. In either case, how would Britain change? Not much. So much ink has been spilled on the personal rivalry between Blair and Brown that it is easy to lose sight of the fact that on the big issues — the case for an open economy, a need to reform public services, an admiration of most things American — they are cut from the same cloth. "People forget that Brown was a founder of New Labour, as Blair was," says Vernon Bogdanor, professor of government at Oxford University. Any differences that emerge between the two men, Bogdanor continues, will be "ones of emphasis and style rather than anything fundamental." Cameron, for his part, has learned from Blair's assiduous courting of the "middle ground" of politics, and has spent the last three months talking about the need to relieve poverty and protect the environment — not themes for which the Tories were once best known. George Osborne, who shadows Brown for the Tories, manfully insists there are "real differences" between the two parties, while conceding that the differences are "not quite as fiery as they once were." Then he gives the game away. Conservatives, Osborne says, "are going to occupy the center ground — that's where we're going to fight our election from."

It's going to be mighty crowded, that much sought-after middle ground, but then that is inevitable. A generation ago, politics in Britain — as elsewhere in Western Europe — were shaped by a titanic struggle between different visions of the world. One side stressed the need for the state to monopolize the commanding heights of the economy, the better to redistribute its gains; the other looked to the market and the price mechanism to guarantee growth and allocate resources efficiently. But those days — when speakers at the Labour Party conference referred to their audience as "comrades," one of Brown's predecessors promised to squeeze the rich until they "howl with anguish," and François Mitterrand won the presidency of France on a manifesto red in tooth and claw — are long gone. As Osborne says: "We've all read Adam Smith now." With the triumph of the market revolution, European politics has been reduced to a choice between technocratic solutions to social problems. (How can health-care costs be brought under control? How can the quality of secondary schools be improved?) Just as Cameron, though a Conservative, has positioned himself as Blair's true heir, so Christian Democrat Angela Merkel comfortably heads a German government in which some of the most important ministries are held by Social Democrats. Europe is living through the end of ideology — that same, well, sameness of beliefs among nominally distinct political groupings that Daniel Bell identified in the U.S. almost 50 years ago. Indeed, it is arguable that genuine ideological cleavages on such matters as civil liberties and the powers of the executive are sharper in U.S. politics now than they are in Europe — the first time that has been true for many years.

It's natural to think that the end of ideology in Europe represents a maturing of political debate. Politicians, after all, have always taken themselves and their contests more seriously than their electorates ever do. Among the public, the competent delivery of public services — clean hospitals, trains that run on time — will trump windy political battles anytime. Yet it isn't only political journalists who might be allowed to mourn the passing of Europe's old political style. In the past, Europe's politics were sufficiently technicolor that they threw up leaders who dreamed big dreams: Margaret Thatcher, determined to reverse Britain's long and complacent slide into a grimy irrelevancy; Helmut Kohl, with his passion to reunify Germany; Jacques Delors, bludgeoning the member states of the European Union into taking seriously their promise to forge an ever closer union; Václav Havel, insisting that Europe was a single moral and political space that should never again be divided into a free West and an oppressed East.

They don't make them like that anymore, of course, and there is a conventional explanation why. In the 50 years after World War II, the state of Europe demanded men and women with ideas vital enough to remake a broken Continent and rebuild its broken economies. That work fit for heroes, one might suppose, is done. Europe is prosperous and free; it needs leaders less than managers.

Yet if the last few weeks proved anything, it is surely that this comfortable idea is an illusion. Europe faces urgent challenges: integrating its growing Muslim population into civil society, coping simultaneously with a declining working-age population and rising expectations of social protection, meeting the economic challenge of Asia, reinvigorating its rotting scientific base. It is not an expression of an atavistic yearning for leadership to say that European nations will not meet such challenges without political figures who have the courage of their convictions and the ability to summon up the blood. If you spot one, tell the guys on the London newspapers: they know what's coming their way, and they're getting desperate.

• MICHAEL ELLIOTT
• Possible successors to British Prime Minster Blair promise continuity. But change is needed