The Bubble Bursts
This month's sharp drop in the government's and Tony Blair's own approval ratings [June's Times poll] restores the political scene in Britain to what we generally assume to be its normal state, after more than three years when it seemed as if the laws of gravity had been suspended. For most of the half-century in which opinion polls have been measuring the state of the parties and ratings of the governments and their leaders, it has been a constant that governments are unpopular; for the first time, Mr Blair's ratings are beginning to be comparable to those of his predecessors.
