It is one of those paradoxes of global telecommunications. Britons, when they awoke on Friday, may have been surprised by the extent of the electoral chastisement they had meted out to Tony Blair. But Americans who followed the UK elections on the C-Span cable network had a clear sense before bed of just how sizeable were the gains for both the opposition Conservatives and Liberal Democrats - in short, of just how Pyrrhic Mr Blair's victory was.

Americans, viewing the result more dispassionately than Britons, will suspect that Labour is lucky to have done as well as it did. Several issues that could have worked to the party's disadvantage were lying dormant on election night. One is Europe. Mr Blair has benefited from the disarray of French voters who this month face a referendum on whether to ratify the European constitution. British voters take it as axiomatic that their public will never be more Europeanist than those across the Channel. Once the French showed an inclination to sabotage Europe themselves, Mr Blair's vacillation over whether Britain should adopt the euro and his own Damoclean referendum on the constitution were taken off the table. Another sleeping issue is immigration. It is easy to imagine news stories that could have given Michael Howard's "Are you thinking what we're thinking?" Conservative advertising campaign far greater resonance than it had.