LONDON -- It is possible that in some dark cavern by the River Thames, or wherever it is that Labor's inner circle does its thinking, party planners are already plotting who is going to do what in government for the next five years. Labor is confident of winning the election on June 7: Its lead in the opinion polls has never dropped below 10 percent, it is currently around 13 percent, and every time a Conservative opens his mouth, the potential Tory vote falls even further.

That's what the polls say. They are hard to believe, because Britain at the moment seems to be filled with a hundred disaffected voices. But maybe that's the point. There are a hundred different grumbles. But at the last election, which brought Labor to power in May 1997, there was really only one loud cry, and that was: "Get the Tories out."

Today, because there is no such single voice, the election is a very different beast -- a subdued and mutinous and fractious one. The frail enthusiasm for politics, for the workings of a democracy, has been submerged under the slow land-slip of cynicism and confusion. While Labor ministers zip round the country weighed down only by their sheaves of statistics showing that things have got better -- smaller classes, more nurses, shorter waiting time for medical treatment, better transport -- whoops, nothing good to be said about transport at all, but look, much less unemployment, low inflation, a national minimum wage. . . . While they briefly take on the burden of trying to prove to a cynical public that governments can and have made things better, the voters ungraciously withhold their enthusiasm.