Britain at the Polls.

• Author: Toynbee, Polly

How did it happen? Britain entered the 1992 election in the midst of a long and deepening recession, with virtually every economic indicator plunging. The Chancellor of the Exchequer rashly spoke of glimpses of green shoots of growth, but they were only a mirage in a desert wasteland. The Labour Party, much reformed, was tiding high in the polls, though that lead was narrowing sharply as the election approached. The left of the party was vanquished, a spent force, and no one could run a successful red-peril smear campaign against them this time.

Looking back, the political scene in Britain at the time was quite similar to that in the United States around August of 1992. The electoral and the economic cycle was badly out of kilter. So deep was the recession that there was no chance for the government to generate a little spending boom, a mini-miracle. Sweeteners were attempted, but none of them were enough to sway the mortgage-stricken voters, overburdened with high interest debts from the wildborrowing eighties.

Margaret Thatcher (like Ronald Reagan in this country), though departed, was a ghost at the banquet, her malevolent presence and the remains of her policies still breathing icily down the neck of John Major. The election was his bid to break free, to be his own man. His main asset was that he was not her, and his virtues were the ones she lacked. Emollient by nature, a consensual leader, Major (like Bush) had spoken of wanting a "nation at ease with itself." That seemed to herald an era of calm, of consolidation, and less of that restless reforming zeal, tearing things up by the roots and standing things on their head which characterized his predecessor's reign. Where she brought the sword and flamboyance, his small colorless presence seemed to promise a time of quiet competence and getting on with the dull and technical job of good government.

But Major had trouble with the "vision thing" --his language was impoverished, his vocabulary limited. If he struggled to find an image or a metaphor it was invariably weak and, by the time he'd finished with it, utterly exhausted. His televised interviews were interminably boring, his speeches lackluster. In desperation, his handlers put him on soap boxes in the middle of crowds--Honest John, the man who was at least physically closest to the people. But once on his soap box, he never had a bright or punchy phrase, no sound bite worth the name.

The campaign Major ran was sharply counter to...