Polls still show Labour set to win

Tony Blair is still on course to win a third term in office as Prime Minister, according to two opinion polls published on Sunday.

A survey conducted for the Sunday Times by pollsters YouGov predicted Labour would take 37 per cent of the vote in the election on May 5, the Conservatives 33 per cent and the Liberal Democrats 23 per cent.

A separate poll by ICM in the Sunday Telegraph newspaper put Labour on 39 per cent, the Conservatives on 33 and the Liberal Democrats on 21.

However, while both polls suggested Mr Blair was firmly in the driving seat with 11 days to go before the vote, they drew conflicting pictures on the way voting intentions had changed over the past week.

Labour's four-point lead in the YouGov poll was the party's biggest so far - up from just one point in the equivalent poll by the same organisation a week ago.

But the ICM poll suggested the gap between the two main parties was narrowing. Labour's six-point lead compared with a 10-point lead - 40 per cent to 30 per cent - in the equivalent poll last weekend.

The polls came as the Iraq war, a factor in the decline in Mr Blair's trust ratings among the electorate, threatened to surface as a major element in the remainder of the campaign.

The Mail on Sunday newspaper ran a front page report saying it had unearthed new information proving that Mr Blair had misled the country over the legal advice he was given in the run-up to the 2003 conflict.

It printed what it said were the contents of a previously unpublished 13-page document written by the government's top lawyer, the attorney general, in the run-up to the war.

In it, the attorney general spells out six reasons why Mr Blair might be in breach of international law if he went to war without a further United Nations resolution, the paper said.

Mr Blair has always maintained he saw only a summary of the document, which suggested it would in fact be legal to go to war even without a second resolution.

He has also said the summary was a fair reflection of the attorney general's more detailed advice.

The Sunday Mail did not publish any direct quotes from the attorney general's document to support its claim.

Both Labour and the Conservatives have tried to play down the Iraq war as an issue in the election campaign. Both voted in favour of sending British troops to depose Saddam Hussein.

However, Conservative leader Michael Howard appeared willing to address the issue in a speech on Saturday when he said the Prime Minister had "only taken a stand on one thing in eight years - taking Britain to war - and he couldn't even tell the truth about that".

The Liberal Democrats, the only mainstream party to oppose the war, were expected to try to push Iraq up the political agenda in the rest of the campaign.

Newspapers said Liberal Democrat leader Charles Kennedy would raise the war as an issue in a speech on Sunday.