Poll gloom for British PM

2008-04-27 14:15

London - British Prime Minister Gordon Brown tried on Sunday to bury a damaging party row as fresh polls predicted doom and ghosts from the past returned to put the boot in ahead of key elections this week.

The governing Labour Party heads into its first electoral test with Brown in charge in Thursday's local and London mayoral elections but weekend opinion polls predicted a battering.

Reports said Labour lawmakers increasingly saw Brown as a liability and Lord Michael Levy, one of Brown's predecessor Tony Blair's closest allies, said the party lacked leadership and Brown was not up to the task.

Blair reckoned Brown was a "liar" who could not beat main opposition Conservative leader David Cameron, Levy said, though Blair's spokesperson insisted the former premier "doesn't agree" with the reported comments.

Brown was forced to offer concessions to rebel Labour lawmakers on Wednesday to avoid a damaging parliamentary vote defeat over his scrapping of the lower 10% tax bracket.

The Scot, 57, tried to limit the damage and rally support on Sunday.

"Whatever the differences and debates of the past week, I know every member of the Labour Party will be working flat out over the next few days to bring this (election) choice alive to people," he wrote in the Sunday Mirror newspaper.

"Labour is always ready to listen to people's concerns, and take action on them."

However, former Labour bigwig Levy told The Mail on Sunday newspaper he was "saddened to see what's happened to the party now... all of the bickering and... that somehow there does not appear to be that strong leadership that the Labour Party so desperately needs."

Levy, Blair's Middle East envoy and chief fundraiser - dubbed "Lord Cashpoint" - was at the heart of the "cash-for-honours" police investigation that clouded the final year of Blair's decade in power, which ended last June.

Blair "told me on a number of occasions he was convinced Gordon 'could never beat Cameron'," Levy said in extracts from his memoirs.

"Blair believed Cameron had major strengths - political timing, a winning personality and a natural ability to communicate... that Gordon would be unable to match.

What a 'liar'

"He kept saying he had never realised how duplicitous Gordon was - and what a 'liar'.

"There are people who are great number twos but when thrust into the leadership role they cannot cut the ice. Gordon Brown has not cut the ice."

Blair's spokesperson insisted: "Tony Blair doesn't agree with the views attributed to him by Lord Levy and fully believes Labour with Gordon Brown's leadership can win the next election."

Meanwhile an ICM telephone survey of 1 010 adults for The Sunday Telegraph newspaper put the Conservatives on 39%, Labour on 29% and the Liberal Democrats on 20%, which would not be enough for the Tories to secure a majority in parliament's lower House of Commons.

However, a poll in the News of the World newspaper of the 145 key swing constituencies where the Conservatives came closest to beating Labour at the 2005 general election found the Tories would win 131 of them.

That would be enough to hand the Conservatives a comfortable 64-seat Commons majority at the next election, the ICM survey forecast.

"Today's poll suggests that the situation in the marginals is worse (for Labour) than is indicated by the national polls," said ICM's managing director Nick Sparrow.

Some 47% said Cameron would make the best prime minister, with 34 percent plumping for Brown. Cameron came out best on seven out of eight hot topics.

Meanwhile The Observer newspaper said a growing number of Labour lawmakers thought Brown was a liability and were casting about among ministers for a long-term replacement.

"A lot of people are saying 'we have lost the next election and the one after that, but when we come back I'll only be 43' or whatever," an unnamed government source told the weekly.

- AFP