BRITAIN: Tony Blair continues to be Britain's prime minister of choice despite being viewed as arrogant, writes Frank Millar, London Editor
The majority of Britons now think Tony Blair lied about Iraq and that the invasion was unjustified.
While conceding that he is tough, they also think him arrogant and too presidential. As for his promise to govern "for the many, not the few", that seems to be adjudged like so much else New Labour spin. More than a third of voters think Blair's Britain has actually become less fair, while the majority think his government has made no difference, and a full 66 per cent think the ruling party less in touch with "people like me" than it was a decade ago. And . . . oh yes: the people are set to return him for a historic third term in office.
These are the terms in which the latest ICM poll confirms the sometimes-grudgingly-admiring but never-quite-loving relationship between the British people and their prime minister.
And rest assured, there is more than enough here to keep the denizens of 10 Downing Street happy as Mr Blair celebrates the tenth anniversary of his election to succeed the late John Smith.
Consider their delight as their rivals - next door in Number 11, and (though 'rivals' might be slightly overdoing it here) in Conservative Central Office - digested the detail of yesterday's Guardian poll.
True, the findings might reflect a sense among voters that the Blair era probably will come to an end some time after the next election. However, Number 10 tracks the crucial detail of all these opinion surveys. And time and again it tells them that a majority of Labour voters still actually support the war, and that Mr Blair (not Mr Brown) is their leader and prime minister of choice.
Bad news, then, for the heir presumptive. And much worse again for the Conservative pretender, Michael Howard, following two by-elections last week in which his candidates came an inglorious third. It seems Mr Howard has succeeded so far only in leading the Conservatives back to the "nowhere" of their last general election defeat and the one before that.
Of course, no one is talking about another Iain Duncan Smith-type assassination. Even more despairingly, the talk rather is of who might lead them after a third defeat into the serious possibility of a fourth.
That mood of despair was heightened following the by-election defeats by Mr Howard's decision to announce that - had he known then what he knows now - he would not have backed Mr Blair in last year's Commons vote sanctioning the war. This, he explained, was because Mr Blair sought the approval of MPs by linking the invasion to the threat posed by Saddam's alleged weapons of mass destruction (WMD) on which we now know the intelligence was patchy and thin.
Such further refinement of his position was inevitably going to revive the Labour charge of "opportunism".
However, the despair of his backbenchers had probably more to do with the general public incomprehension which will have greeted Mr Howard's insistence that he, nonetheless, still supports the war.
Mr Howard's position is, in fact, perfectly coherent. He would have supported George W Bush's war (for regime change) but not Tony Blair's (to counter the threat posed by stockpiles of WMD, which, the prime minister now accepts, Iraq probably did not have by the time of the invasion.) The attendant charge against Blair is that Mr Howard would have told the country the truth.
Already cleared by Lord Butler of "deliberate distortion" or "culpable negligence", Mr Blair was always confident of surviving Mr Howard's renewed Commons assault yesterday. Ahead of the event, indeed, the big talking point was whether Mr Blair would reshuffle his cabinet today, in an exercise designed to end speculation about his intentions for the leadership and to demonstrate his determination to go on and on.
After last month's reported "long night of the soul", Mr Blair and his allies now appear determined to bury Gordon Brown's ambitions once and for all. The insistent talk is of Mr Blair seeking and serving a full third term, with the Great Helmsman resolved that it should be "meaningful". The second term was to have been about "delivery" of promised world class public services but has instead been dominated by the war, while the landmark achievements of the first term are by now largely forgotten by the electorate.
So, Mr Blair looks again to his place in history and a probable third term to be dominated and defined by epic battles over the Euro and the European Constitution. The polls confirm he can win the election. However they also tell us that two vital ingredients are required to convert British voters to New Labour's European cause - trust in the chancellor and trust in the prime minister. Only one of them currently has that.