Polls and Iraq protests help Teflon Tony to come unstuck

LONDON - British Prime Minister Tony Blair was hit yesterday by the worst set of opinion polls in his six-year premiership, anti-war protesters chanting "Troops out of Iraq and Blair out of No 10", as he prepared to face down party loyalists.

But he vowed to fight on.

"I want to carry on doing the job until the job is done," a defiant Blair said as support nosedived over his decision to go to war against Iraq and a string of unpopular domestic reforms.

"The worst thing we could possibly do at the moment is to back off and back away," he told the Observer as the ruling Labour Party launched into its annual conference, which looks certain to be a stormy test of Blair's resolve.

In London, police said some 20,000 people marched in the first big protest there since the war ended in April. Chanting "Troops out of Iraq and Blair out of No 10", protesters demonstrated against Britain's continued military involvement.

"It was all lies," protester Peter Mason, 45, said. "The millions who demonstrated before the war were right."

In February, about a million people marched through London trying to prevent the war in the biggest political protest march in British history.

Organisers of yesterday's protest plan more rallies when United States President George W. Bush visits Britain in November.

London Mayor Ken Livingstone told a packed Trafalgar Sq the way to secure peace in the Middle East was to "Get out, get out, get out".

Both voters and the party faithful are showing their disillusionment with Blair, who first led the party out of the political wilderness in 1997 to a landslide election victory.

Long gone are the days when "Teflon Tony" could do no wrong with the crucial "Middle England" voters he so effectively wooed.

His popularity and trust ratings plummeted after the Iraq conflict. The failure to find weapons of mass destruction, the suicide of a weapons expert on Iraq and the inquiry into the expert's death have all badly buffeted Blair. And the latest round of opinion polls make grim reading for the embattled premier.

Forty-one per cent of party members polled by the Observer wanted Blair to step down before the next election.

Sixty-four per cent of voters polled by the News Of The World tabloid no longer trusted Blair. A Sunday Times poll showed Labour's support had fallen to just 30 per cent.

In his Observer interview, Blair conceded to feeling "battered" after months of bad news, but he showed no signs of backing down over Iraq or health and education reforms.

Despite the misgivings of millions of his compatriots, Blair said that launching military action with the US to topple Saddam Hussein was entirely justified.

"I believed it to be the right thing to do and still believe it to be the right thing to do," said Blair, counselling continued patience as the hunt for weapons of mass destruction went on in Iraq.

He also warned that al Qaeda, chief suspect behind the September 11, 2001 attacks in the US, was still very much a potent threat.

- REUTERS

Herald Feature: Iraq