Blair Likely To Survive Brit Vote

(AP)  Voters battered Prime Minister Tony Blair throughout Britain's election campaign with questions about Iraq, but as it ended Wednesday there was scant evidence that opposition parties had laid a glove on him.

Britons choose 646 members of the next House of Commons on Thursday. Polls suggest Blair will win a third term, defeating Conservative leader Michael Howard — who also supported the Iraq war and whose attacks on Blair's integrity and calls for a crackdown on immigration appear to have failed to win over the public.

"This is the gritted teeth election," Professor Steve Reicher at St. Andrews University observed. "People are thinking, what choice do I have? They think, 'I don't like what Blair has done, but I don't like Howard.'"

But even if Blair wins, a sharp reduction of his Labour's party's House of Commons majority — currently 161 more than the combined opposition parties — would be seen as a personal repudiation and could hasten his departure in office. Such a result could also make future leaders more reluctant to back Washington militarily against the public's will.

Blair has insisted he be judged instead by Britain's strong economy — but in one campaign stop after another he faced sharp, even rude, questions from voters about his decision to join the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.

Still, the louder Howard called Blair a liar about the reasons for going to war, the further the Tories faded in opinion surveys.

The Populus poll in The Times on Wednesday showed Labour supported by 41 percent of the sample, the Conservatives by 27 percent. The telephone poll of 1,420 people had a three percent margin of error.

"The Conservatives are now worse placed than before their record low results in 1997 and 2001," wrote Peter Riddell, The Times' poll analyst.

The Conservatives also sought to win votes by promising better health services and to be tough on crime and immigration. Blair's Labour Party pointed to its economic legacy — presiding over the nation's longest postwar economic expansion and keeping inflation and unemployment low.

Britain's place in the European Union and the debate over joining the single currency — big issues in the 1997 and 2001 campaigns — were scarcely mentioned.

The prime minister said this would be his last campaign, and that he would stand down sometime before the next election. His most likely successor, Treasury chief Gordon Brown, was often at Blair's side during the campaign as the two men worked hard to bury their reported differences.

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