Empowered by the people

Friday, Aug. 31, 2007 | 10 p.m.

London

You have probably noticed that we have a new prime minister in the United Kingdom, not least because when he visited the U.S., your president, who cannot be faulted for his good manners, did not accommodate him at the usual address for visiting heads of government -- Blair House -- but put him up at the White House. A nice touch. Although you may remember our previous leader, Tony Blair (no relation) -- indeed you seemed to like him much more than we did -- on our side of the Atlantic it is as if he never existed.

If this were the Soviet Union, then his name would already have been erased from the textbooks and his statues torn down. As it is, although he will never be forgotten, nor should he be for good things and bad, you cannot find anyone who misses him and his spin-doctor style. Instead we have good old Gordon Brown, far more like one of us. Very likely to have his hair messed up, his tie askew and his chin unshaven.

The first thing Gordon did when he became prime minister was to cancel the British summer. Oh, I can hear you wags say: How would we notice the difference? Sun is not one of the first things that springs to mind when thinking about holiday Britain. Well, we do usually have some sun and reasonably high temperatures, but Tony Blair had managed to use up all the allocation for 2007 in April and so poor Gordon was faced with a difficult decision straight away. Should he try and tough it out and hope for the best or bite the bullet and just cancel summer? He opted for the latter, and how wise he was.

No sooner had that decision been made -- how refreshing to have a leader prepared to grasp the hard nettle of reality, we thought, when he was faced with a series of tasks of Herculean proportions. Floods and plague. Neither of these were the least amusing for those caught up in them, but they did let Gordon once again show his mettle.

Canceling his holiday in the South of England -- well, there was no point in staying anyway after he had canceled summer -- he rushed back to London and began to react in traditional fashion to the crises. He held meetings. Many, many meetings. No population could have asked more of its chief administrator. He quickly found the cause of the floods -- too much rain apparently had led to our rivers' overflowing into our towns and cities -- and rushing out in his gum boots before anyone remembered about his canceling summer, he went visiting those affected. He called for more flood defenses, more sandbags and more of that community spirit we Brits so love to think we have. Then back to London for more meetings.

And then came the plague. Foot-and-mouth disease was found in a few cows in an area where there were few cows anyway, mainly an area growing rich people who work in the City of London. We had had this a few years ago, but this time Gordon moved swiftly, banning all the cows in the area from traveling anywhere else and then holding more meetings (different people from the flood meetings, of course) to try to discover the cause. At the time of writing we are still not sure whether the minor outbreak, now all contained, came from a leak in a nearby facility designed to cure or treat foot-and-mouth and other animal diseases!

But there is something serious behind all this flippancy. Of course Gordon Brown cares about his image and is using the media to highlight his strengths and minimize his weaknesses. In that he is no different from Tony Blair, at whose shoulder he stood loyally for 10 years. But there is a change of style and a move away from glib sound bites, however well articulated, toward something we judge as more sober, with more depth and feeling. Brown's main advantage with us is that he is not Tony Blair. His main problem is that he was involved fully with all of the policies of Blair's governments since 1997. Therefore, apart from looking different, Brown has to do things differently, and one of those just might be Iraq.

Listening to your president deliver his own view of history as it relates to Vietnam and Iraq to a hand-picked audience reminded me that there is no such audience for any such speech here in the U.K. This has always been an unpopular war, the reasons for which have been viewed from the outset with deep suspicion. That you now feel the same just compounds the feeling here that the presence of our soldiers, for all their bravery and professionalism, has run its course. There are no success criteria visible on any horizon. Brown can show that he really is not Blair by bringing our troops home. Whether he will, and risk the jolt to the much valued relationship with the United States, remains to be seen.

David Handley, a former British diplomat, is a London consultant to the defense industry. This column originally appeared in The Providence Journal.