BRITAIN: Conservative leader Michael Howard and Liberal Democrat leader Charles Kennedy were on the campaign trail yesterday even before Prime Minister Tony Blair confirmed the UK's general election would take place as expected on May 5th.
As Mr Blair prepared to travel to Buckingham Palace to formally ask Queen Elizabeth to dissolve parliament next Monday, Mr Howard was perhaps hoping to inject a prophetic note by launching his campaign at London's Renaissance Hotel.
Buoyed by one opinion poll actually suggesting a five-point Conservative lead among those "certain to vote", Mr Howard immediately raised the issue of trust in the prime minister.
Implicitly accusing him of taking voters for granted and "already secretly grinning" about a third election victory, Mr Howard warned: "Beware yet another election where Mr Blair says one thing to get your vote on polling day and does something quite different afterwards."
Before travelling to Birmingham and Manchester, Mr Howard again promised a programme of "action" on the issues which mattered to "hard working Britons" who, he suggested, were "fed up" with the Labour government. Voters, he said, faced a clear choice: "They can either reward Mr Blair for eight years of broken promises and vote for another five years of talk. Or they can vote Conservative to support a party that has taken a stand and is committed to action on the issues that matter."
In turn boosted by the defection of Labour's Ribble Valley candidate to his party, Mr Kennedy insisted the Liberal Democrats represented the "real alternative" to Labour as he promised an election campaign which would address people's hopes rather than their fears.
Beginning his whistlestop tour in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Mr Kennedy declared: "For a country like ours with so much going on, a fairly prosperous society, a fairly stable society, a society and a country by international standards which measures up well, we are going to be positive, we are going to be ambitious for our country and what we have to offer our country.
"So I am not going to spend these next few weeks talking Britain down. I am going to be addressing people's hopes, not playing on their fears and that is going to be the positive message from the Liberal Democrats during this campaign."
However, with Lib Dem opposition to the war in Iraq an integral part of that "positive" message, Mr Kennedy heard his party's latest convert, Stephen Wilkinson, explain his defection from an "increasingly authoritarian" Labour Party and his loss of belief in a Labour government that had become "a lapdog to George Bush's right-wing Republican administration".
Mr Kennedy suggested: "When Labour cannot even retain the support of their own candidates, it is surely a sign of things to come."
Britain's bookmakers were unconvinced, however. As the election pledges mounted on every front, Ladbrokes made Labour a 16/1 on shot, with the Conservatives 7/1 against, and the Lib Dems 100/1.
Meanwhile, Mr Blair was writing to party supporters urging them to "chase every vote" in what he insisted would be a tough election. "From now until May 5th, me and my colleagues will be out every day in every part of Britain, talking to the British people about our driving mission for a third term."
That mission was to entrench hard-won economic stability, accelerate change and widen the opportunities available to the British people. The election represented "a big choice", he said, adding: "The British people are the boss and they are the ones that will make it."
While SNP leader Alex Salmond said his campaign would focus on making Scotland matter to the election, Plaid Cymru's Elfyn Llywd said his party provided the real opposition in Wales.
The Green Party announced it was fielding 25 per cent more candidates than in 2001 on a "People, Planet, Peace" slogan.
The UK Independence Party said it was the only party which believed the United Kingdom should govern itself, free of European controls.
Three of the four opinion polls published yesterday suggested Labour's lead over the Conservatives has slipped to between 2 and 5 percentage points - enough for a comfortable Labour victory.