The coming year will see whether Tony Blair can win Britain's Labour Party a historic third term in office. Frank Millar assesses the prospects.
If the re-election of President George Bush was the crucial news story of 2004, nowhere was it more keenly anticipated or received than in 10 Downing Street.
Prime Minister Tony Blair had been famously embarrassed when asked whether he and the Texan Neo-Con prayed together during their White House summits. But there was neither embarrassment about, or concealment of, the fact that Old Labour - and much of what remains of Mr Blair's "New Labour" party - had been praying for a Kerry victory in November's presidential election.
The prime minister's aides had privately branded them misguided, even as they braced themselves for the possibility. Mr Blair famously gets along with whomsoever the job requires him to deal with. So the official pre-election line had it that he could anticipate as close a working relationship with a President Kerry as he had had with President Bush, and with President Clinton before him. Indeed, on the all-important issue of Iraq, those close to Mr Blair insisted that - had the American electorate opted for change - it would be change characterised by continuity.
That may have been true, at least in that the immediate priority for the coalition would still have been securing Iraq ahead of the scheduled elections in January. And even Mr Blair's most hardened opponents allowed (at least rhetorically) that a Kerry presidency would have to be equally tough in the "war" on terror. Yet the attendant belief was that a Kerry victory would hasten the return of British troops, if only because the new president would be in search of his own early exit strategy. With that, in turn, would have come a renewed American commitment to both the United Nations and Europe, with its reassuring emphasis on the need for "consensus" in the conduct of international affairs.
Even now, in their disappointment at Senator Kerry's defeat - and their apprehension of where the second-term Bush presidency will lead and leave the world - some Labour insiders remain convinced that Mr Blair privately shares this view. Indeed, in his rush to be the first foreign leader to visit the White House after the election, they divine evidence of Downing Street's acute awareness that Mr Blair is dangerously shackled to a president over whom he exerts little discernible influence and one who might yet take them both into war over Iran.
Your correspondent remains unconvinced. It is true that Mr Blair has been damaged by the aftermath of the Hutton and Butler inquiries, the revelations that the intelligence about Iraq's weaponry was woefully thin, and the consequent deepening belief that his government exaggerated the case for war - and still survived, seemingly unaffected, in the opinion polls reflecting the future voting intentions of the British public. However, the rejection of President Bush by the American people would have been interpreted, rightly or wrongly, as a judgment on all that they had done together. With Spain's José-Maria Aznar already gone, the British people might have hesitated to re-elect a distrusted prime minister who had divided his country over an unpopular war in alliance with a right-wing Republican president after the American people had turned their backs on both.
Yet it would also be wrong to think it a matter of mere political calculation inside Number 10. Before the war, Mr Blair had almost boasted that the situation was even worse than the British left feared - because he actually believed in what he and President Bush were doing in respect of Iraq and in response to the international terrorism Mr Blair considers the new global threat of the 21st century.
Now, having seen his friend restored to the White House, Britain's very own Neo-Con leader promises a 2005 general election campaign echoing many of the themes of this autumn's American hustings. Despite a promised bumpy ride for the British economy over the next six months, Chancellor Gordon Brown will trumpet Labour plans for an "opportunity" Britain. However, national security and personal safety will be central to a Labour manifesto, making the global link between legislation to counter neighbourhood nuisance, a new FBI-style assault on organised crime and stringent new laws to counter the al-Qaeda international terrorist network. And, if newly-appointed Home Secretary Charles Clarke proves less populist than the fallen David Blunkett, Mr Blair himself will hammer home the message against Conservative leader Michael Howard.
In an extraordinary role-reversal, it is the arch-Atlanticist Mr Howard who has this year found himself unwelcome at the White House, while managing to appear opportunistic about the war and dividing his party over his determination to back Blunkett's reinstatement of the British ID Card abolished by Winston Churchill. And as Conservative MPs fear a re-run of 2001 and 1997 - if not worse - it is Liberal Democrat leader Charles Kennedy who hopes to harvest support from those convinced that Mr Blair took the country to war on a false prospectus and increasingly fearful that this is a government dangerously dismissive of ancient liberties and freedoms.
Discounting a Conservative miracle, conventional wisdom would suggest that the Lib Dems will find it difficult to break through in Labour's heartlands, while an overall increase in Lib Dem support could actually put some existing Tory seats at risk. Against that, some analysts allow that a sustained and more uniform Lib Dem rally could work against the government in Labour/Conservative marginals, raising at least the possibility of a significant reduction in Mr Blair's majority, if not a hung parliament.
With the general election still predicted for May or June, however, most commentators believe two things.
First, that Mr Blair is still on course to win a historic third term for Labour, albeit on a historically low turnout, and if only for want of a credible alternative. And, second, that that is the point at which British politics becomes really interesting, because it will mark the beginning of the end of the Blair era.
Such talk infuriates loyal Blairites. They insist that, with the authority of a fresh mandate, Mr Blair will re-shape the cabinet in his own likeness, speculating even that he could force the brooding and ambitious Gordon Brown out of the Treasury and into the Foreign Office. Advocates of a Brown succession, on the other hand, insist that the chancellor will not be forced anywhere, that he will not agree to leave the Treasury and that he might even welcome a brief return to the back benches, from where he would stake his claim. And the confidence of the chancellor's allies is rooted in the belief that Mr Blair's position is even more similar to that of President Bush than is yet widely realised: that, by declaring his intention not to seek a fourth term, Mr Blair has reduced himself to the position of an American president already into his second. Thus, according to this cheerful Brownite assessment, Mr Blair's problem is not with winning the election but with proving that he is not a lame duck thereafter.