British Prime Minister Tony Blair is less popular than his main opposition rival for the first time in 12 years, according to poll results published today.
Pollsters YouGov, a survey commissioned by the Daily Telegraphnewspaper, found 30 per cent of Britons thought new Conservative Party leader David Cameron would make the best prime minister, against 28 per cent who preferred Mr Blair.
The Telegraphsaid it was the first time any of five successive Conservative leaders had been preferred to Mr Blair since the prime minister took the helm of the Labour party in 1994 as opposition leader under Conservative Prime Minister John Major.
Mr Blair also suffered more bad news on the electoral front, with results from byelections for two vacant parliamentary seats yielding a poor showing for Labour.
In the Welsh district of Blaenau Gwent, independent Dai Davies defeated a Labour candidate for parliament, thwarting Labour's hopes of winning back one of its heartland seats, which Mr Blair's party lost at the last election last year.
Today's results also brought bad news for Mr Cameron, however, who took over the Conservative leadership seven months ago.
A Conservative candidate nearly lost the seat of Bromley, scraping by with just a few hundred votes in a seat that had been held strongly by the Conservatives since 1945.
Labour placed an embarrassing fourth, with fewer than 2,000 votes, behind the fringe anti-European UK Independence Party.