Iraq war fallout hits support for British PM's Labour party: poll
Mon Aug 4, 7:39 PM ET
LONDON (AFP) - Support for British Prime Minister Tony Blair (news - web sites)'s ruling Labour party has never been lower in the last 16 years, a poll found.
The Populus survey was carried out for The Times, a right-of-centre daily, which said the results reflected the damage caused to his party by the way Blair handled the Iraq (news - web sites) war and its aftermath.
The poll found 34 percent support for Labour, two points down on July.
The Conservatives, the largest opposition party, were supported by 32 percent, also down two points, while the smaller opposition Liberal Democrats were on 25 percent, four points up on last month.
The poll found Blair had a personal trust rating -- the difference between people who do not trust him and those who do -- of minus four.
On Iraq, 51 percent of those asked thought it was the right thing to do to launch the US-led military action on March 20 which led to the toppling of Saddam Hussein (news - web sites), while 41 percent considered it wrong.
Populus interviewed 1,000 people over the weekend.
Blair is facing the gravest political crisis of his career and has suffered a slump in opinion polls after the death of a government arms expert at the centre of a furore about how Britain went to war.
The prime minister is set to be called before an independent judicial inquiry into the apparent suicide of David Kelly, a government scientist identified by the BBC as the source of its report in May that Downing Street misused intelligence data to beef up the case for war on Baghdad.
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