Prick the Blair 'bubble', Tories tell voters

By Hasan Suroor

LONDON, JUNE 4. Three days before Britain goes to the polls, Tories were today struggling to contain the size of a widely predicted Labour victory which, according to opinion polls, could be bigger than even its 1997 triumph.

In a new campaign, the party asked voters to prick the Blair ``bubble'' and avert a Labour landslide which, it warned, would be disastrous for the country.

The Tory chief, Mr. William Hague, taking a cue from Lady Margaret Thatcher, cautioned that a big victory for Labour would produce the ``most arrogant, aggressive and intimidatory government in modern history''. A numerically bloated Labour Government would ``marginalise Parliament, manipulate the media and seek to suppress all dissent or disagreement with them,'' he said. His statement, climaxing a weekend of Tory focus on the danger of a large Labour majority, came amid increasingly grim news for the party's own prospects with three different opinion polls predicting its rout. Newspapers left little room for imagination with headlines such as ``It really is all over now'' and ``You're a loser, baby'' - the latter accompanied by a photograph of Mr. Hague and his wife Ffion who appears to be heading in an opposite direction.

The switch to negative campaigning came about as the party reconciled itself to a defeat but believed that it was still not too late to ``wipe the smile off Blair's face'', as The Sunday Telegraph put it.

A similar Opposition campaign in Queensland, Australia, in 1995 had produced a dramatic outcome with the ruling Labour party which was seen to have the election in the bag came close to losing it.

It is called the ``Queensland effect'' and though it is unlikely to work in Britain, the Prime Minister, Mr. Tony Blair and his team have been trying hard to counter it, calling it a ``last throw of the dice'' by the Tories, and a desperate attempt to create apathy.

``It is a calculated attempt either to stop people voting at all, or to ask them to vote Conservative not for any positive reason but simply to sneak in by the backdoor'', he said.

The so-called Labour landslide, he argued, was a ``pie in the sky'' and people must get out on June 7 and vote in order to make it a reality.

The Chancellor, Mr. Gordon Brown, who is in charge of the Labour campaign, said Tories were not even asking people to vote for them - ``but simply to vote against Labour, vote against politics or even not vote at all.''

The risk of being lulled by opinion polls and take victory for granted highlighted by another senior Minister, Ms. Margaret Beckett who recalled how Mr. John Major won the 1992 election despite a Labour lead in opinion polls. Observers also recalled Sir Edward Heath defying polls to defeat Labour many years ago.

Much of the weekend saw the strange spectacle of the Tories talking about a Labour landslide and Labour trying to play it down - a strange reversal of a ``normal'' campaign in which both sides claim to be winning. The Liberal Democrat leader, Mr. Charles Kennedy whose party expects to improve upon its 1997 performance, said there was talk of Tories calling for a ``boycott'' of the elections. This was ``extraordinary'', coming from the party of Winston Churchill, he said.

Mr. Hague, meanwhile, said he would accept personal responsibility for his party's defeat but refused to say if he would resign in the event of a debacle. ``I take my responsibility for whatever the outcome, but I've no plans to do anything other than continue doing the job I'm doing,'' he told BBC's Breakfast with Frost amid speculation over a challenge to his leadership after the election.

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Section  : International
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