LONDON – American conservatives tend to grind their teeth extra hard at the thought of Gerald Ford’s 1976 campaign, or George H.W. Bush’s tired and lackluster 1992 campaign, or the never-really-had-a-prayer 1996 effort of loyal party man Bob Dole. It’s one thing to lose when the tides of history are running against your party, and you make the most of a limited opportunity. It’s another to blow a chance against a flawed rival like Jimmy Carter or Bill Clinton.

Right now it appears British conservatives will be grinding their molars to dust Friday morning. On paper, the British prime minister is an extraordinarily vulnerable incumbent, hated by many in his own Labor Party, distrusted by a majority of voters, a political leader whose charisma and eloquence are starting to strike many Britons as a little too slick.

And the Tories are poised to do almost nothing with it. Maybe they’ll pick up a few seats and shrink Labor’s 161-seat parliamentary majority a bit at the margins. But the widely expected result on Friday is that Mr. Blair survives, and he will have strengthened his almost certain successor, Gordon Brown, “chancellor of the exchequer.” Picture a role combining Dick Cheney’s jack-of-all-trades vice presidency and a big job in the Treasury Department.

There’s a long and tense history between the two – Mr. Brown looks at Mr. Blair’s tenure and sees an office he should, and would, have had if not for a few twists of fate. (Mr. Brown’s friends say Mr. Blair broke a deal to have Mr. Brown run unopposed for his party’s leadership. Mr. Blair’s supporters say there never was such a deal, and that Mr. Brown didn’t have the votes to beat the conservative Prime Minister Major anyway.)

Messrs. Brown and Blair have bickered on and off since Mr. Blair took power in 1997. Publicly, Mr. Brown backed Mr. Blair on the Iraq War, but there was widespread reporting in the British press that he was not an enthusiastic supporter of military action. The branches of the Labor party that loathe President Bush believe that Mr. Brown would be less supportive of unilateralism, military force, cowboy-ism, etc. Many parliament members and opinion leaders in the Labor Party are at least as liberal as the Democratic Party’s base, and they’re as outraged at Mr. Blair as rank-and-file Democrats were with Senator Lieberman and Rep. Dick Gephardt for voting to authorize the Iraq war.

If Mr. Blair is re-elected, few United Kingdom political observers expect him to serve a full five-year term. Some are predicting a departure as soon as late 2006 or early 2007. American conservatives who find the rabidly anti-war, anti-Bush, and at times downright anti-American rhetoric coming from the Guardian newspaper and the British left ought to be scowling at the thought of an imminent Prime Minister Brown. But they face this grim possibility because their British counterparts on the right have dropped the ball.

Few would have predicted this when Michael Howard took control of the Conservative Party in November 2003. After nearly a decade of being about as unified as, say, the pre-Schwarzenegger California Republican Party, the Tories dropped their Ian Duncan Smith – a veteran generally liked by members of his party, but not considered a terribly effective leader. (Picture a British Bob Dole.)

Mr. Howard’s first speech as party leader could easily be given by any GOP House member:

“No one should be over-powerful. Not trade unions. Not corporations. Not the government. Not the European Union. … it is an exquisite irony that the prime minister who railed against ‘the forces of conservatism’ now finds himself at the head of the forces of reaction.”

To American ears, Mr. Howard’s address echoes George W. Bush’s 2000 and 2004 convention addresses, where he gibed Democrats for intractably opposing school choice and Social Security investment accounts but offering few ideas of their own. Throughout his inaugural speech, Mr. Howard referred to “21st-century conservatives” – perhaps the British version of “compassionate conservatism.”

Fast-forward to today, where instead of “Are you thinking what we’re thinking?” the more appropriate Tory slogan might as well be “Bollocks!”

In the past 18 months, Mr. Howard’s Tories have demonstrated three serious weaknesses.

First, they’re a (mostly) pro-Iraq-War party in a (mostly) anti-war country. Neither they nor Mr. Blair have been able to budge a reflexive and angry “Blair lied, people died” opposition in much of the electorate.

Second, their domestic policies have been vanilla at best, pale imitations of Labor at worst. (The one exception is their slightly stronger-than-expected stand against illegal immigration.)

Third, the Conservatives’ prime ministerial candidate and face of the party, Mr. Howard, has been pretty bad. Maybe “Dole in ’96” bad. Mr. Howard combines the raw charisma of Steve Forbes, the “I feel your pain” compassion of Newt Gingrich, and the cuddly warmth of Tom DeLay. He’s lived up to the jibe that there is “something of the night” about him.

Maybe, just maybe, poll respondents are lying about how much the immigration issue matters to them, and the Conservatives will pull off a better-than-expected performance. Perhaps the Liberal Democrat Party will play the role of Ralph Nader’s Green Party in 2000, and that will help the Tories, too. But most likely, American policy-makers ought to begin preparing for more difficult days, when they have to work with the less friendly Prime Minister Brown.

Mr. Geraghty is a contributing editor at National Review magazine.