LONDON – Prime Minister Tony Blair has won a third successive term, an unprecedented feat for the Labor Party, but he will take office with a greatly diminished majority in Parliament and one of the lowest-ever shares of the national vote.
Based on exit polls, the British Broadcasting Corp. was projecting Labor with about 37 percent of the vote, a 5 percent drop from its 2001 total; the Conservative party had 33 percent, unchanged from the last election, and the Liberal Democrats had 22 percent, a 2 percent increase.
The Associated Press, citing official results, later confirmed Blair’s victory.
With about one-quarter of the constituencies counted, those percentages translate into 358 seats for Labor, down from 412 in the last election. The Conservatives, led by Michael Howard, were aiming for 209 seats, a gain of 43, and the Liberal Democrats seemed likely to get two or three seats.
The final result will not be known until this morning, but if those numbers hold, it would mean that Labor has lost about half of its 160-seat majority in the 646-seat House of Commons.
Speaking from Sedgfield, his home constituency in northeast England, a subdued Blair acknowledged that the voters had sent a sharp message.
“The British people wanted to return a Labor government, but with a reduced majority,” he said. “We have to respond to that sensibly and wisely.”
Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott told the BBC that Labor’s diminished majority was disappointing but “compared to some of the majorities that governments have had in the postwar period, it’s not so bad.”
David Blunkett, another Labor stalwart, noted that the Conservatives had managed little more than 200 seats, about the same as Labor at its nadir in 1983.
But the loss of some 80 seats is a serious blow to Blair’s prestige, and it now seems unlikely that Blair will be able to serve out the full five years of his terms as he said he intended to do. Instead, he will come under intense pressure from within the party to step aside in favor of his longtime rival, Gordon Brown.
, the chancellor of the exchequer, who has emerged as Labor’s most popular leader and heir apparent.
Several analysts were predicting that this would happen in a year or two at most.
Brown had little to say Friday morning, other than an acknowledgement that the Labor had not done as well as expected.
“We will listen and we will learn,” he said, echoing Blair’s comments.
For the Conservative Party, this was the third consecutive defeat. But the mood in the Tory camp was considerably lighter than it had been in the previous two landslide defeats. Although still a distant second, they can claim they gained ground.
“We’re smiling, and the Labor Party is looking pretty glum. That says it all,” said Malcolm Rifkind, a former defense minister in the last Conservative government and a successful candidate Thursday in the affluent Kensington and Chelsea constituency of London.
There was little doubt that Blair was damaged by the Iraq war.
“I know Iraq has been a divisive issue in this country, but I now hope that we can unite again and look to the future there and here,” he said early Friday morning after the results in his Sedgfield constituency had been announced.
Although the war remains deeply unpopular in Britain, voters generally did not rank it as one of their high priorities. But what did matter to them was the perception that Blair was less than honest in making the case for taking Britain to war.
Both the Conservatives, who supported the war, and the Liberal Democrats, who didn’t, made Blair’s trustworthiness and credibility an issue in the campaign, with Howard going so far as to call Blair a liar.
In the last week of the campaign, Blair was hurt by disclosures that suggested he ignored a report by his attorney general that raised serious questions about the legality of the war.
Blair steadfastly defended his decision to go to war and tried to change the subject to more mundane domestic issues such as health care and education.
But the issue refused to go away. In Sedgfield, where Blair won easily in a field that included 14 other candidates, his closest competitor was independent Reg Keys, the father of a soldier killed in Iraq.
In many labor strongholds, the Liberal Democrats, headed by Charles Kennedy, appeared to be the beneficiaries of a substantial antiwar protest vote. But according to the BBC’s projection, they seemed likely to gain only a handful of seats in Parliament.
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(c) 2005, Chicago Tribune.
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