Feb. 13, 2006 issue - The "Alice in Wonderland" world of British politics gets curiouser and curiouser. Witness just a few events from last week. Despite a comfortable majority in Parliament, Prime Minister Tony Blair lost a key vote in the House of Commons—a loss he could have prevented had he bothered to show up to vote. Meanwhile, his presumed successor, Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown, busied himself trying to burnish his centrist credentials and bury his leftist ones. Among other things, he prevailed upon his 80-year-old friend Alan Greenspan, who last week stepped down as chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve, to become "honorary adviser" to Her Majesty's Treasury. And David Cameron, leader of the Tories, invaded a Blairite think tank to give a big speech praising... the prime minister.

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The Cameron Effect continues to rock Britain. Nine years after their abject defeat by Blair's Labour Party, the Tories believe they can win the next election under their 39-year-old champion, who proclaims himself Blair's true heir. One poll last week showed "Cameron's Conservatives," as they've rebranded themselves, ahead of Labour for the first time. The Tory strategy is as old as Julius Caesar: divide and conquer. Blair has said he won't lead his party into the next campaign, and has anointed Brown to don his mantle. Cameron's job—as Caesar, needless to say—is to drive a wedge between the two Labour heavyweights and seize the vote-rich center where the P.M. is now encamped. "We've got a good chance to do this," one of Cameron's closest advisers told NEWSWEEK.

Tellingly, the adviser didn't want to be quoted by name: he doesn't want to be accused of irrational exuberance, to borrow a Greenspan phrase. But you can hardly blame him for being pleased with the Cameron revolution thus far. The game plan: isolate Brown as a big-government, high-tax, old-style socialist to the left of Blair. "If you were a Brown supporter, you could mount a pretty strong case that he was just as much in the center as Blair," says Nicholas Boles, a Cameron supporter and director of Policy Exchange, a think tank. "But the public isn't persuaded. He's generally seen as favoring a more controlling, intervening and regulating state than Blair. And he's unquestionably old hat—dour and grumpy and disapproving of fun." This perception, argues Boles, is "a huge opportunity" for the Conservatives. Wanting to stay positive, the Conservatives are not unloading their opposition research on Brown yet. They're counting on the media to do it for them.

The Tory gamble is not without risk. London's political hothouse has obsessed over Blair-Brown/left-right divisions for years. But do voters? A recent Populus poll showed that, on a 0-10 spectrum, with five being the political center, Britons on average put themselves at 5.11. Slightly to the left are Blair (4.91) and Brown (4.71), with Cameron (5.72) slightly to the right. If Cameron's no Margaret Thatcher (6.89), Brown is hardly Leon Trotsky (unrated).

To his chagrin, Cameron may be doing Labour's Blairite wing a favor by forcing what Labour M.P. Denis MacShane calls "fusion politics" upon the Labour Party. The more pressure Cameron brings to bear, the closer Brown must move to the center, as he has recently by falling in line behind Blair's education reforms. Like Alice, David Cameron may discover that the world on the other side of the looking glass is fraught with not only wonder, but peril.

With Kasia Gruszkowska

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