BRITAIN: British Prime Minister Mr Tony Blair has been warned he stands to pay the political price of any failure to win broad and continuing popular support for war with Iraq.
The warning from former Conservative Chancellor, Mr Kenneth Clarke, came as the latest opinion poll showed a further fall in British public support for military action without explicit UN approval while recording the prime minister's personal approval rating at its lowest level since the last general election.
At the same time the Liberal Democrat leader, Mr Charles Kennedy, reflected the sense of a widening gap between the ruling political class and the British public, by confirming he intends to join the Stop The War march in London next Saturday.
Organisers are predicting that up to half-a-million protesters will descend on the capital while Mr Blair addresses a Labour Party conference amid warnings that some Labour candidates in the forthcoming local and devolved elections might stand on an anti-war ticket.
Mr Blair will be hoping to face his party activists armed with fresh evidence from Mr Hans Blix's second report next Friday confirming continuing Iraqi failure to fully co-operate with the UN weapons inspectors. However, yesterday's YouGov poll confirmed that the Blair government has been damaged by the row over the "intelligence" document which turned-out to be part-plagiarised from the work of an American student 12 years ago, with four out of 10 British respondents accusing US Secretary of State Mr Colin Powell of distorting the evidence against Iraq in his submission to the UN last week.
The poll for the Mail on Sunday found just 20% of Britons willing to back war without UN approval as opposed to 35% last September, with a staggering 63% endorsing Nelson Mandela's charge that Mr Blair is behaving "more like the foreign minister of the United States than the Prime Minister of Britain".
Further striking confirmation that Downing Street is still failing to win the propaganda battle came with the finding that fewer people in Britain believe Iraq is linked with the al-Qaeda terror network than did a week ago. Focus groups also tracking British attitudes to the Iraqi crisis confirm that three quarters of the British public believe war will make Britain more vulnerable to terrorist attack.
YouGov's chairman, the respected pollster and commentator Mr Peter Kellner, allowed that the polling figures will change if and when British troops are committed to action, and that Mr Blair can still reasonably expect popular backing if the war proves successful. However, he told the BBC's World This Weekend programme that the protracted polling evidence suggested Mr Blair "could find himself in trouble quite quickly" if the war proved "messy and drawn-out". Mr Clarke underlined that warning and cited the example of Vietnam as he insisted it was only possible to go to war with "the broad bulk of popular support".
If Mr Blair was unable to persuade the British public that there was a firm case for military action, Mr Clarke said he thought Mr Blair "will pay for that". Meanwhile, Chancellor Gordon Brown has said the financial cost of war is justified by the need to deal with Saddam Hussein and that his "prudent" handling of the economy meant Britain was in a position to meet its share of the cost of conflict and the rebuilding of Iraq which would follow. A defence think-tank estimated last week that war in Iraq would cost the British taxpayer at least £3.5 billion.