GeorgeH, it is you who is confused I fear. Mrs Thatcher never lost a General Election. Indeed the Tories won again, after she'd gone. And of course, even when so-called Labour finally won, who was the first invited guest at Number Ten?

How heartening it is to see evidence in this thread that Blair is being rumbled. To me, this one-time CND campaigner's choice of the Labour Party as his career vehicle, when it was at rock bottom, was as breathtakingly cynical as Hitler's choice of the the National Socialist party when that too was a pathetic rump. I have no difficulty at all in imagining Blair running off the rails, if not quite on Hitler's scale, then at least on a par with say Mugabe, to mention another self-proclaiming Christian.

Blair leads a party that promised an end to selection in secondary education. Then when it came to his own kids, he chose the Brompton Oratory - leapfrogging several nearer schools, and opting for one that is massively selective (it likes rich Catholics best). Eventually Cardinal Heenan put a stop to Blair partaking of the Holy Eucharist at Catholic Mass, on the reasonable basis that Blair isn't actually a Catholic. At least one of the Catholic schools that Blair bypassed (St Richard of Chichester) closed soon afterwards , and no wonder. Families cottoned on immediately - if it wasn't good enough for Blair's kids, it wasn't good enough for theirs. They flocked away in droves.

Shortly before the last election, Blair was put under repeated pressure in a tv interview, to say what he thought about the gap between rich and poor getting wider under his stewardship. (It has been widening in the UK since 1980, faster than in any developed country on earth except New Zealand.) In the end, he said he thought it was OK. Pure Thatcherism.

No wonder he was returned on the lowest turnout in Britain's democratic history (apart from 1918, when soldiers were demobbed too late to vote). Blair was quick to lambast the Gothenburg protestors for threatening democracy. (Bertie Ahern was a bit more temperate, suggesting that maybe European policymaking needed to be more open and inclusive.) Blair should have remembered that another drop in turnout comparable to the last two, and the voers will be a minority. Legitimacy could well passs to single-issue campaigns that have given up on the futile farce of politics.

Just like Blair himself has given up on parliament. Most policy anouncements are now made elsewhere, free from irritating challenge. All postwar Prime Ministers, from Attlee to Major, attended to vote in 35-50 per cent of divisions. For Blair the figure is less than 12 per cent. What is so amazing about his arrogance is that he actually gets away with it.

On personal qualities - competence, honesty, etc - John Major is streets ahead of Blair. Odd it was that Major, the son of a circus trouper, proud posessor of two 0-levels, and brought up in the inner-city streets of Brixton, came to lead the Tories, while Labour got Blair - the privileged and privately educated son of a well-to-do Tory.

Any American observers who share Jed Marum's fear of the colour pink seeping into Euro-politics, must find it bewildering that leftish France has the world's finest railway (the TGV) while the UK has Railtrack.