Blair in front as rivals slug it out

LONDON - The UK's Liberal Democrat party has urged voters to gang up on the main opposition Conservatives and wreck their high command as a clutch of polls showed Tony Blair set for re-election.

New opinion polls put the Labour Party ahead of the Conservatives by a range of 1 to 10 percentage points.

Even the lowest margin, if repeated on polling day, would give Blair a parliamentary majority of about 60 because of the way Britain's electoral map now favours Labour.

At the upper end, Blair would secure a third successive landslide victory and condemn the party that governed Britain for most of the 20th century to another term in opposition.

The Liberal Democrats, polling around 20 per cent, twisted the knife, urging Labour supporters to vote tactically and wreck the Conservative Party's upper echelons.

"I think it's very clear that the Conservatives can't win," LibDem election strategist Lord Rennard told GMTV.

Rennard said with Labour all but unassailable, its supporters could afford to back his party in a handful of key seats where they are the main challenger in order to oust Conservative chiefs in a so-called "decapitation strategy".

"Labour supporters in those seats would be better off throwing in their lots with the Liberal Democrats and ending up with a Liberal Democrat MP," he said.

Labour chiefs continue to play down talk of victory for fear that their core supporters, many disillusioned by the war in Iraq, will not bother to turn out.

"You have to earn every vote, we don't take it for granted," Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott told BBC Radio.

The LibDems are even aiming at Conservative leader Michael Howard. Rennard said if every Labour voter in Howard's southern England seat switched to the LibDems on May 5, he would be out.

Most analysts believe Howard is safe but the party's finance spokesman, Oliver Letwin, and home affairs chief, David Davis, are defending slim majorities and in real danger under an electoral system where each constituency elects one member of parliament and second place wins nothing.

Blair has already put in place his own plan to change Labour's leader by declaring he wants to serve a full third term -- a first for a Labour premier -- but not seek a fourth.

Most political insiders expect Blair to quit well before the election after next to allow a new leader, probably finance minister Gordon Brown, time to bed in.

"He's staying for a full term, why don't you accept it. You are getting it from the man himself saying that," Prescott said.

Blair called a truce with Brown early in the campaign, all but promising him he would remain Chancellor of the Exchequer after May 5 and putting him at the heart of Labour's campaign having stripped him of his traditional strategy role last year.

Party folklore has it that Brown allowed Blair a free run at the Labour leadership in 1994 in return for a pledge that he would one day stand aside for the finance minister.

Brown's allies say the deal should have been honoured by now and must be met early in the next parliament.

- REUTERS