As he heads into a May election, British leader Tony Blair isn't facing defeat so much as history. After expertly trimming Labour's more progressive aspirations to the prevailing conservatism that he himself shares, the question now is whether the party's longest serving PM can finally deliver

In the natural world, exotic problems often lend themselves to exotic solutions. An imported pest is best neutralised by an imported natural competitor because the competitor knows what it is dealing with and how to deal with it. In Britain, the Conservative Party is trying to apply the laws of nature to the laws of politics. It has imported what it hopes will be an Australian answer to a problem with quite definite Australian origins, for which nothing else has worked.