For those ridiculing the idea of Blair calling a snap election after September 11, saying he’d be laughed at and ridiculed behind closed doors or that the voters would see right through him and desert Labour in droves, it is worth noting that Australian Prime Minister Howard did exactly that; the election was announced on October 8th and held on November 10th. The government increased its vote by 2% and picked up two more seats.
The election was more or less scheduled to happen then, was it not? The previous election was in October '98. And Labor had been running ahead of the Coalition in the polls for much of that year, yes?
There's a bit of a difference between an election just occuring post-9/11 by natural happenstance, and a deliberate and clear decision to cash in on that environment. That said I don't agree that Blair would be laughed out of court. Prime Ministers generally do - or should I say, did in the day - call elections when they thought they could win them. It's hardly unprecedented that an election would be called after susbtantial and violent events.
My objection here is threefold:
One, the train of events needed to lead to a postponement that long is frankly pretty incredible;
Two, if it had been postponed that long there is, as I've said, a clear bias against holding elections in Autumn, particularly amongst Labour people;
Three, if people keep asserting that Blair would utterly demolish the Tories beyond OTL then it is a reasonable question to ask why John Howard only managed to inch Labor in these circumstances. Now you would say that John Howard is no Blair and had been trailing against the opposition, but even so, Howard only just scraped it. It doesn't seem that there's the towering 9/11 bounce that people assume.
Above all, though, the premise of this is simply wrong. It's innacurate to say that Blair recieved a sustained or substantial bounce after 9/11 from the basis on which he was already polling. Blair was
already hitting fifty percent or so well before 9/11 - and these polls had tended to overestimate Labour's lead in the run up to '97 and '01. If Blair recieved any bounce in '01 that I can see, it was simply the one people often get from being re-elected.