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LONDON: Britain's opposition Conservatives opened up a record lead in opinion polls Thursday, further hammering Prime Minister Gordon Brown's Labour Party shortly after he returned from his summer break.
The new Ipsos MORI survey comes just a day after Brown insisted he would win the next general election, despite bleak overall poll ratings and persistent talk of a leadership challenge.
According to the pollsters, backing for the Conservatives among likely voters was 48 per cent, while support for Labour was just 24 per cent, with the polling firm saying it believed the 24-percentage-point gap was the widest in the history of British telephone polling.
Were those results replicated in a general election, due by May 2010 at the latest, the Conservatives would likely win a landslide victory.
The gap is markedly narrower, however, among all eligible voters, with 42 per cent backing the Tories against 28 per cent for Labour.
Brown, who returned from his summer holiday Monday, was asked on Wednesday if he thought he could emerge victorious from the next general election, which must be held by mid-2010, despite the odds against him.
"We're going to go on and win," he told reporters en route to the Beijing Olympics closing ceremony, where the Olympic flag will be handed over to London ahead of its Games in 2012.
Last month, his Foreign Secretary David Miliband penned a newspaper article on the future direction of the Labour Party which many commentators interpreted as a possible first salvo in a leadership challenge.
Brown told reporters he had "no difficulty" with the article, adding that it could have been written by "any member of the cabinet" and his relations with Miliband were "fine."
He pledged to tackle issues like rising gas and electricity bills and petrol prices - which he said were of most concern to Britons - in September, when the political season effectively restarts with conferences held by the main parties.
Labour will likely be disheartened to find, however, that according to the poll's findings, it is rated below the Conservatives on every aspect of policy except for healthcare, where it holds a narrow three-point lead.
Crucially, the government, which had cultivate a reputation for economic competence prior to the global economic downturn, claims just 23 per cent backing for its ability to run the economy, against 38 per cent for the Conservatives.
The results mark a sharp turnaround for Labour, which held a double-digit lead in most opinion polls in late September 2007, but has been hurt as the British economy has taken a turn for the worst, coupled with a series of personal data loss blunders and heavy losses in recent by-elections.
Brown faces another potentially embarrassing by-election in his native Scotland, triggered by the death of a Labour lawmaker earlier this month.
John MacDougall's majority of over 10,000 votes in Glenrothes, just north of Edinburgh, would normally be considered a safe cushion, but after losing a 13,500 majority to the Scottish National Party (SNP) in another by-election in Glasgow last month, it could struggle to defend the constituency.
Ipsos MORI questioned a total of 1,005 voters by telephone between August 15 and 17, of whom 522 were described as likely to vote.
- AFP/yb
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