Election off and running

ANALYSIS By Andrew Marr Political Editor, BBC News

Is an historic victory within Tony Blair's grasp?

Not every 'historic' occasion is exciting. This year's general election is certainly a potentially historic moment.

If Tony Blair wins a third successive victory, he is alone among Labour leaders and it would be, by any standards, a remarkable achievement.

If he is defeated, that would mark either the Conservatives' biggest swing back into power ever - yes, bigger even than their famous victory against the Liberals in 1900.

Or it would mean the eruption of the modern Liberal Democrats, finally breaking the mould of British politics after decades of optimistic whistling.

Anti-Tory bias?

Most commentators, though, following most pollsters, do not expect Labour to be beaten.

A recent conclave of wise old birds, professional forecasters of long experience, decided the likeliest outcome would be a Labour majority of between 70 and a hundred seats.

The current cabinet has a few natural glums, but even they say in private their worst fear is to see the current majority cut to around 50, a figure most British governments would have been delighted with.

Michael Howard has been helped by an Australian strategist

Part of the reason is a strong anti-Tory bias in the voting system at the moment; the shift of population across old constituency boundaries favours Labour.

And yet, there are enough uncertainties in British politics at the moment to keep people watching, reading and listening.

The first and most obvious one is turnout. In 2001, like this election, people thought they knew the result before the campaign started. Partly because of that, only 59% of us voted.

Caution

It was the lowest turnout since this country became a full democracy, with the extension of the franchise to women.

It could go lower this time, with serious consequences for Labour. When pollsters ask declared party supporters about their determination to vote now, Labour people are markedly less enthusiastic than Tories or Liberal Democrats.

We have to be cautious about such polling but it is a perception shared by almost everyone involved in the campaign, including Labour MPs.

Charles Kennedy is due to become a father during the campaign

Many of them have done their local sums and concluded that a relatively small drop in turnout could scupper them.

Tony Blair has got that message, as has Gordon Brown: both are concentrating on 'core' or 'traditional' Labour voters who are interested in pensions, pay, working conditions, childcare and rather less interested in civil liberties.

Labour tacticians say their campaign is overwhelmingly aimed at their own supporters, intended to cajole, enthuse or scare them to actually cast a vote.

Masochism

Yet the prime minister is anxious that a mixture of disappointment about Labour's record, residual anger about the Iraq war, and complacent disregard of the Tory threat will keep turnout depressed.

He knows there is a 'Blair issue' or a 'trust issue'.

His answer is the so-called masochism strategy, which pits him against groups of sceptical or disgruntled people and twists a little political theatre out of the confrontations.

The idea is that disillusioned voters can be won back only after they have shouted at the prime minister, or rather, sitting on their sofas at home, have cheered while others shout at him.

Will turnout drop to new lows?

He has made his ritual obeisance to the people and, in the psychiatrist's language, they have permission to return to the fold.

It is not a stupid idea. It may even work.

But it may be optimistic about the level of disillusion among many voters.

Furthermore, though the Labour campaign is meant to build in a higher level of spontaneous confrontation than ever before, remember, they need to excite people too - many of us will believe it when we see it.

Security is a real problem. And you can't order spontaneity by the yard. You may hope for "this much and no more". But if Labour gets days of genuinely angry confrontations, there will be a rethink.

Dissent

Meanwhile, other Labour candidates have their own, bleaker, assessment of the Blair problem: the party has offered versions of its campaign literature that omit the usual clutch of pictures of the prime minister, while anti-war Labour candidates on the left intend to emphasise their rebelliousness and dissent.

The Tories have already had their moments of internal dissent, with the de-selection of Howard Flight and the party's problems in Slough. Yet by the standards of the last decade, the Conservatives are relatively united.

Europe has virtually disappeared as a dividing issue, because of the overwhelming presence and political control of Euro-sceptics: the Howard policy of renegotiation is genuinely radical, yet the pro-Brussels Tories seem to have given up the fight.

Labour may be easy favourites, but no-one's actually asked the country yet.

In the early stages of election skirmishing, the Conservatives surprised even themselves by catching Labour off-guard and off-balance time and time again - over immigration, the numbers of cancelled hospital operations, and money for pensioners struggling with council tax.

Even the Budget failed to provide the immediate momentum Labour had banked on, when the party over-egged its claims about looming £35 billion cuts under the Tories, and had an embarrassing couple of press conferences.

Howard Flight's remarks, and the ruthlessly effective Labour use of them, ended that run of Tory success, but the party is more focussed and self-confident than it has been for years.

Politics is prone to myth-making and many Tories are convinced that the Australian conservative tactician Lynton Crosby is a backroom saviour; the former Tory leader William Hague thinks he's the best election operator in the Western world except for George Bush's legendary Karl Rove.

The problem for Michael Howard is that this might be a 'Tory '92', that is, they might be thought to have won the campaign, as Labour did under Neil Kinnock, in the first flush of Peter Mandelson's re-branding, while nevertheless losing the actual election. We shall see.

Shifting seats

Certainly, the party is concentrating on key voters in key seats with a sharpness and vigour they have not shown since their days in power.

And remember that, short of winning, the Tories could provoke some interesting parliamentary consequences if, for instance, they cost Mr Blair his personal Labour-modernising majority in the Commons, or even won a majority of the seats in England.

Liberal Democrats say privately they hope for 20 to 30 extra seats, another big advance that turns Britain into a genuinely three-party-dominated system.

Their key policies have been carefully selected to appeal to key groups, including pensioners and families with children at University - indeed, students themselves.

On tax, civil liberties and the Iraq war, they have positioned themselves to the left of New Labour, though they loathe being pinned to a left-right spectrum.

Yet they desperately need many naturally conservative-minded voters too.

Tough questions

Charles Kennedy has for some time now being happily upending all the Westminster conventions about how political leaders behave.

He is about as far from the obsessive, hard-working, detail-devouring ideal as it is possible to imagine; which may be why he remains so popular among the electorate.

Yet he has some hard questions too - not least his stated determination to enter no deals with Labour or Tory, whatever the election result. Aren't elections about power, even, these days, for Liberal Democrats?

They will certainly alter the shape of the campaign, though. We talk about a general election, and it is general to the nation; but it may feel like several regional elections, too.

In the English South-west, Labour barely count and the real contest is between Tories and Liberal Democrats. In large parts of the English north, it is a Labour-Lib Dem fight, with the Conservatives out of it.

Devolution

In Scotland and Wales, politics has been reshaped by devolution: in Wales the Tories are offering voters the choice of keeping their assembly and seeing a big cut in their Westminster MPs, or retaining their Commons over-representation, and binning the assembly.

And with Sinn Fein and the DUP continuing to advance against the once-dominant parties of Northern Ireland, that should be interesting too.

So there is plenty here to dig our teeth into.

The sheer unpredictability of turnout, wildly different polls and the slips and triumphs of the campaign to come mean that the outcome is open.

Labour may be easy favourites, but no-one's actually asked the country yet.

If the 'pre-campaign' is anything to go by, we are in for a month of ambushes, un-choreographed political dramas and the gory unravelling of many promises.

It isn't Dr Who, but it will be fun, and in its curious way, historic too.