LONDON — With less than a week to go in the election that he says will be his last hurrah as prime minister, Tony Blair is looking rather wan. His eyes are ringed from too little sleep, his middle is starting to bulge, and the lines on his forehead have deepened.
The earnest words continue to tumble nimbly from his lips, but increasingly for his audiences, the magic seems gone. People say they will vote for him and his Labor Party over his hapless opponents, but many also say they no longer believe his explanations, justifications and promises after the experience of the last eight years.
"There is no alternative (alas)," reads the cover of the election-week edition of the Economist magazine, over a picture of a smiling, somewhat vacant-looking Blair.
For a candidate who is on course to be reelected to a third straight term Thursday and who, at 51, is arguably the most successful Labor politician ever, Blair is emerging from a grueling campaign as something of a loser.
In interviews, he has acknowledged that his popularity is down. As a result, he is campaigning more alongside Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown, who is seen as Blair's heir apparent at the helm of the party.
With a large majority in Parliament, Blair has been able to almost double spending on education and the National Health Service, hire more police and forge a peace deal for Northern Ireland. With finance minister Brown, he is presiding over an economy that is humming along nicely. And, although the war in Iraq was unpopular, Blair has steered Britain through what appears to be the worst of it, with two British deaths there in the last two months.
Nevertheless, the criticism that Blair is too slippery and too glib has stuck. An almost palpable sense of betrayal often brings not only anger but also hurt during the Blair campaign's frequent town hall meetings with the electorate, which have been dubbed masochism sessions.
Late last week, at one of his ritual grillings -- this time at the BBC television program "Question Time" -- the audience booed when he appeared and then became even more hostile.
"That is a lie! You lied to this country, and that is why we can't support you!" shouted one young man, accusing Blair of exaggerating the intelligence about Saddam Hussein's threat to the world.
"What new stealth taxes do you intend to introduce first?" asked another.
