This spring, London residents will choose a mayor who will have hitherto unheard-of authority. The vote will follow months of struggle for Prime Minister Tony Blair and other British political leaders. Ironically, the search for viable mayoral candidates has all but exhausted the very political parties that had hoped to gain power through the election.

London has had a lord mayor since the Middle Ages, but in modern times, it has been little more than a courtesy title, an annual reward for merchant philanthropists. The lord mayor’s nominal jurisdiction is only over the square mile in the center called the City of London.

So when Blair came up with the idea of executive mayors with real power for Britain’s larger cities, the only people who bridled were hard-line traditionalists. They objected that it was one more step down the slippery slope toward complete Americanization.

The political parties in Britain particularly loved the idea. A LaGuardia-Walker-Giuliani for London provided the opportunity to promote one of their own to greater glory — and maybe even tackle some of London’s chronic problems, such as traffic gridlock, lamentable public transportation and a failing police force. Party leaders enthusiastically began preparations for the first election to be held May 4, 2000.

But of the three effective parties, only the Liberal Democrats could agree on a candidate. They speedily nominated an unknown, Susan Kramer, who has stayed that way and will inevitably finish a poor third.

The Labor and Conservative parties, however, soon found themselves with splitting headaches, for more or less the same reason. Each had a charismatic front-runner whom their party machines did not want.

On your left, find Ken Livingstone, an unreconstructed far-out socialist. As leader of the last local London administration, Livingstone consistently embarrassed the Labor government with such radical gestures as inviting two leaders of the Irish Republic Army as official guests, long before they were welcome anywhere else in the United Kingdom.

But ordinary members of the Labor Party loved “Red Ken” for introducing cheap subway tickets and other populist measures. Many of them — perhaps a majority — prepared to vote for him. Blair, faced with the prospect of his great ideas being subverted by “the founder of the loony left,” as he called Livingstone, set about stopping him.

On your right, we have Jeffrey Archer, author of lurid bestselling novels, whose passion is politics. Archer has held a series of high-profile jobs under Conservative prime ministers Margaret Thatcher and John Major, culminating in a seat in the House of Lords. Never mind that Lord Archer’s career was littered with allegations of theft and fraud. In order to get into Oxford, he falsely claimed to have been at the University of California. In another gaffe, he walked out of a Toronto store with two unpaid-for suits, insisting he was looking for the shirt department. He also indulged in insider trading of television shares.

When it became obvious that the rank and file of London conservatives were prepared to ignore the unpleasant aroma around Archer in favor of his undoubted charm and electric crowd-pleasing, Tory Party leader William Hague bit the bullet. Smiling bravely, he announced that he was convinced that Archer was “a man of probity and integrity,” adding, “I am going to back him to the full.”

While Archer busied himself visiting malls, kissing babies and ordering for a millennium fancy dress ball a costume of Dick Whittington (the only lord mayor of whom anyone had ever heard), the Tories relished the spectacle of Labor desperately attempting to leaven democracy with the dictates of its leader: Blair set up a panel packed with his own people and gave it the power to veto candidates.

This transparent attempt to bar Livingstone upset the public. Even Blair’s own choice for mayor, veteran Frank Dobson, announced he would withdraw unless Livingstone was allowed to run. This gesture, however, may have sprung less from a sense of fairness than from the fear that, if barred, Livingstone would run as an Independent against him. If he had been less genteel, Dobson could have quoted LBJ’s celebrated preference about tents and pissing.

Meanwhile, the third Labor candidate, erstwhile theater and movie star Glenda Jackson, M.P., was completely upstaged.

As Hague, not hitherto known as a funny fellow, neatly put it to Blair across the floor of the House of Commons, “Why not split the job in two, with Frank Dobson as your day mayor and Ken Livingstone as your nightmare?”

Tory laughter stopped abruptly on Nov. 19 when the Murdoch tabloid, News of the World, presented Archer with a sworn statement by an old friend and the transcripts of three bugged telephone calls. They concerned a 13-year-old libel case in which the Daily Star was ordered to pay $750,000 in damages for suggesting that Archer had bedded a prostitute. Though he in fact admitted giving the woman $3,500 to go abroad, judge and jury believed him when he said he had been having dinner with friends on the night in question.

The new evidence came from a freelance television producer, one Ted Francis. Francis confessed that he had written to an attorney at Archer’s request falsely saying that they had dined together that night. He later received $18,000 in used notes from the author as backing for a TV series that was never made. In the calls, Francis had pretended that they had been found out, and Archer obligingly confirmed the fateful facts.

When Hague heard that the paper was telling all, he abruptly ordered Archer off the mayoral ticket. The Conservatives have gone back to the drawing board to find a new candidate.

Meanwhile, over at the Labor Party, the vetting panel reluctantly OK’d Livingstone’s candidacy. London members are preparing to vote between Livingstone, Dobson and Jackson. It looks ever more likely that the wrong candidate — from Blair’s point of view — will win.

But the nightmare is not over yet. With the forecast of a new far-left and a powerful “alternative power base” being created, it may just be starting.

Here’s a radical suggestion for how President Obama should kick off his State of the Union speech: Why not point out today’s news from the United Kingdom — a surprising fourth quarter decline in GDP — and argue that the same dire fate might await the U.S. if Republicans succeed in their dream of sharply slashing the federal budget this year?

Here’s the back story. Wasting no time, the new coalition U.K. government led by Prime Minister David Cameron, made a dramatic package of government spending cuts its first order of business. Many U.S. conservatives have looked with great longing at the austerity surge. The numbers are staggering — an average 19 percent cut for all government departments, resulting in half a million public sector layoffs.

Talks between the UK’s Labour Party and the Liberal Democrats have collapsed, various sources are reporting. The Evening Standard says Labor leader and Prime Minister Gordon Brown will resign tonight. The LibDems are supposedly set to make a governing pact with the Tories, which would make Conservative Party leader David Cameron Britain’s new Prime Minister.

After the recent national election, Labour holds 258 seats, the Tories have 306, and the Lib Dems hold 57 seats. A Tory/LibDem coalition could form a majority government, but Labour and the LibDems would’ve needed local nationalist and socialist parties to join a coalition.

Apparently, if the British parties can’t hash something out by next week, the Queen will appoint her corgi, Sir Winston Furchill, as prime minister. After all, they’re not about to put the cat, Margaret Scratcher, in charge.

Gordon Brown, the intensely unlikable soon-to-be-former prime minster of the U.K., just announced that he will step down as the leader of the Labour Party.

Brown’s move looks like an attempt to stop the Liberal Democrats from forming a coalition government with the Conservatives, who won the most seats in last Thursday’s national elections, but who didn’t win enough to form a government. No one’s sure how well the Lib Dem/Tory negotiations are going; some Tories say they’re going well, but Tory right-winger Iain Duncan-Smith said today that the Tories are uninterested in electoral reform, a Lib Dem priority that would end “first-past-the-post” elections and help third parties pick up more seats in Parliament.

In addition to being a highly paid charlatan, Pollster Grifter Mark Penn is epically, heroically wrong about everything.

Yesterday, as British voters were heading to the polls, he wrote a wonderful column for the Washington Post. The column is a love letter to the legendary Independent Voter. Penn’s entire argument is predicated on the success of Britain’s Nick Clegg, the leader of the Liberal-Democrat party. Penn says the inevitable, stunning success of that third party will definitively prove that Mark Penn is always, always right when he says that America is full of independents who think about things the same way that Mark Penn does: