AMERICA WANTS TO HEAR BLAIR

The beef crisis has focused interest on the visiting Labour leader

Tony Blair, who begins a three-day visit to the United States today, has timed his visit to perfection. American interest in Britain seldom ranges beyond Emma Thompson and the Royal Family, but the ins and outs of the Mad Cow drama have seized the national imagination to such a degree that people have actually started to take something resembling a glimmer of interest in British politics.

The late night TV talk shows, faithful measures of the lowest common denominator of American popular wisdom, have been tapping a rich vein in Mad Cow jokes. Yesterday, a dentist from Syracuse, New York State, faxed six delirious pages on cannibalism among cows to the Independent office in Washington. The man on the Arlington omnibus has, it seems, gone beyond speculation on the science of bovine dementia and is beginning to wonder what the political fall-out in Britain will be, whether the days of John Major (suddenly almost as famous as Hugh Grant) might be numbered.

Enter Tony Blair, hitherto an object of curiosity among Washington insiders, who besides meeting with Boutros Boutros Ghali, breakfasting with Henry Kissinger and chatting with President Clinton, will be making his face known in half the households in the country when he appears on Thursday on ABC's Good Morning America. (No prizes for guessing the issue that will dominate the interviewers' agenda.)

The last time a Labour leader made an official visit to the US was in July 1990. Neil Kinnock told reporters he felt "10 foot tall" after a youngster had recognised him on a Manhattan street. He felt even better after President Bush talked to him politely and at length - President Reagan had given him a frosty 20 minutes in 1987 - and the American press wrote that he was a nice fellow who just might make it to Downing Street.

A cover story on Mr Blair in the New Yorker in February was headlined simply "The Next Prime Minister". Interviews published in the last week in the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal have drawn approving attention to Mr Blair's "moderation". He is not a wild-eyed radical like some of his cloth-capped Labour forebears, the sub-text went, he is not suspiciously pinko: he talks our language, he's one of us.

Furthermore, in a country where the greatest insult is to be called a "loser", Mr Blair has the air of a man who will flatten John Major at the next election.

It is in Washington, of course, that he will come under the closest scrutiny. His first engagement in the capital will be a cocktail party on Thursday evening at the home of Sidney Blumenthal, the author of the New Yorker's flattering February profile. Among the guests will be senior members of the Clinton Administration and eminences of the Washington press corps.

Mr Blumenthal said there was "tremendous" interest in Mr Blair - primarily because of the perception that Mr Blair is a sort of Son of Clinton, or perhaps rather Clinton's smart younger cousin, and because of the analogies between the New Democrats and new Labour.

"This is a story of somebody who takes control of a political party and tries to remake it in his own image," Mr Blumenthal said. "Clinton tried to do it first so people are very interested to see how Blair is going about it."

When the two men meet in the White House on Friday morning they are likely, against the backdrop of their looming election battles against conservative opponents, to exchange ideas on how to market a progressive agenda at a time when people are increasingly suspicious of "big government".

Shared political challenges, similarity of styles and a common distaste for John Major - the President has not forgotten the Conservative Party's unsavoury support of George Bush in the 1992 election - should make for good chemistry.

"While Clinton's relationship with Major has smoothed out a bit after a rough beginning," Mr Blumenthal said, "the potential is there in 1997 for a President Clinton and a Prime Minister Blair to enjoy the kind of close, mutually supportive relationship we saw in Reagan and Thatcher, a relationship which - if Blair restores Britain's position in Europe - could only boost Britain's international influence."