POLITICS HOLDS about the same appeal to me as that icky film that coagulates on custard or a Jacuzzi full of pigswill, but like death, taxes and bubble gum on theater seats, it is inevitable and unavoidable.

Its most beguiling incarnation, the general election, is nearly upon us in Britain, testing whether this nation so mired in dead cows, crashing trains and off-limits signs can long endure under the present government or whether it's time to change donkeys.

We have in one corner a prime minister, Tony ("Our Tone") Blair, whose ability to run the country conjures up the name of Edwin Smith, the first (and only) captain of the Titanic. Old Ed's debacle took only a few days instead of four years, but it left the same sinking feeling.

In the other corner we have the leader of the main opposition, William ("Don't Call Me Bill") Hague of Yorkshire, a part of England rather like Texas without the humility. Hague's appearance has been likened, unkindly but not inaccurately, to an oversized fetus.

Blair's is the Labor Party, a leftist-leaning bunch whose practitioners promote everything from free buses for lesbian mothers to dismantling the historic House of Lords and replacing its ermined members with party apparatchiks known collectively as Tony's Cronies.

Hague's Conservative Party is bedrocked, perhaps appropriately, in the Stone Age as far as many of its policies are concerned, but at least it doesn't try to scuttle the nation's every tradition in the name of "modernism."

The problem with the Tories is they haven't had a leader with balls since Margaret Thatcher. Hague hasn't yet earned his set, although he regularly reduces Blair to rubble in that quaint parliamentary weekly slanging match known as Prime Minister's Question Time.

(In the third corner, if the ring simile can be stretched, are the third-party Liberal Democrats, whose leader, one Charles Kennedy, is staring into a pygmy's kneecap when it comes to political stature.)

Blair and Co. have had four years in power, and on a performance evaluation sheet their record would be grounds for instant dismissal without severance pay from any reasonably astute company.

During its term, crime has risen sharply while police stations are closing down at the rate of five a month across the country. Car theft in Britain is the highest in Europe, but the thieves are dismissed as harmless "joyriders" and given slaps on the wrist, to go out and nick another vehicle before nightfall.

Blair's government spends time and money trying to get fox-hunting outlawed while traveling by train is allowed to become a form of social Russian roulette. Aged and underfunded tracks collapse and trains crash at a seemingly regular rate, killing and injuring scores of passengers.

A rail journey today can take twice as long as it did in 1895 - if, indeed, you are fortunate enough reach your destination alive and with all 206 bones intact.

Blair has surrounded himself with a set of dodgy ministers. One, a chap named Peter Mandelson, has managed to get himself kicked out of two ministerial posts. Another, an old school chum of Our Tone's named Lord Irvine, got caught buying wallpaper on the taxpayer's tab at $500 per roll.

A couple have been caught trying to get passports for their millionaire pals, and another crony does part-time work for an Egyptian shopkeeper who accuses Prince Philip, Queen Elizabeth II's hubby, of helping engineer the Paris car crash that killed Princess Diana and his own playboy son.

But my main gripe with Blair is his drive for a "modern Britain" and an emphasis on what he calls - or used to call - "Cool Britannia." Much of his government is composed of unreconstructed Labor socialists whose agenda is an end to the monarchy in favor of a republican (with a small "r") Britain.

The government had best beware. Tourism is Britain's second-leading industry. (The first, I seem to recall, is providing weapons of mass and incidental destruction to every fifth-world despot on the planet with dreams of grandeur, but that is another story.)

Americans and Canadians and Japanese and even the woeful French and Germans do not come here to see "modern Britain," with its 1960s high-rise cellblocks of government-supported housing and traffic pollution and late-if-ever train service and business towers that they build so much better in their own countries.

They come here to see where Anne Boleyn had her head chopped off in the Tower of London, and to take snapshots of the Changing of the Guard at Buckingham Palace and to tour the Queen's State Rooms at Windsor Castle and to prowl the magnificent grounds at Chatsworth House.

They come here on the off-chance they may see Queen Elizabeth waving from her horse-drawn state coach as she processes down The Mall, not to see our dumpy deputy prime minister, one John Prescott, zipping about in one of his two Jaguar autos en route to a meeting to lend his support to environmental protection.

In fact, a recent survey showed 70 percent of the folk in this country support the monarchy and oppose any form of republicanism. So by extension, they oppose Blair and a lot of what he stands for, right?

Wrong. Two other public opinion polls say Tony Blair and Labor hold a 26 percent lead - 52 percent to 26 percent - over Hague and his Conservatives. In other words, the former is headed for another five-year term on a landslide and the latter is about to become political toast.

There is no accounting for the tastes of the body politic. I'm tempted to get away from it all by heading for the most remote section of the countryside I can find until the election is over.

Except that the countryside is full of dead cows with their feet pointing heavenward and the hoof-and-mouth epidemic that Blair's government said a month ago was "under control" has put much of rural Britain off-limits for the foreseeable future . . .

Somewhere in this cottage there's some campaign literature from the Monster Raving Loony Party that I'm going to reread. I have a very open mind just now.

Thought for the Week: Work is for people who don't know how to fish.

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