BRITAIN: The growing row over Scottish MPs' votes on English laws threatened to rain on chancellor Gordon Brown's parade as the Labour Party again sank to its lowest poll rating for 20 years.
Football tensions further fuelled renewed debate about the future shape and unity of the UK as Mr Blair slapped down Scotland's first minister, Jack McConnell, telling the BBC he thought Scots should support England's World Cup campaign.
With his presumed successor, Mr Brown, publicly rooting for an English victory, the prime minister said neighbours should support each other and that he was "irritated" by the attitude that people should "detest" the opposition.
However, that was nothing to the irritation inside Numbers 10 and 11 Downing Street at the confirmation of a solidifying five-point lead for David Cameron's Conservative Party, coupled with a warning from the Labour-dominated Scottish affairs committee of MPs that government failure to finally resolve "the West Lothian question" could undermine its 1998 devolution settlement.
The man who originally posed the question in the 1970s, former MP Tam Dalyell, claimed vindication: "You cannot have a stable situation in which part - but only part - of a kingdom, which, above all, you wish to keep united, has a parliament."
Citing "huge" problems in London, with even Labour MPs unhappy at having unpopular government policies on health and education pushed through the Commons with the help of votes by Scottish MPs, Mr Dalyell said: "What is happening is that a substantial number of my English colleagues are absolutely livid that the Scots - who do not have foundation hospitals in their constituencies and do not have city academies - are imposing on England that which the majority of English MPs do not want."
The question or anomaly - giving Scottish MPs a say on English laws while denying English MPs comparable influence where power has been devolved - has been thrown into fresh relief by the recent appointment of Scotsman John Reid to the troubled Home Office.
While Mr Brown has been attempting to develop themes of "Britishness" as a prelude to his presumed succession to Mr Blair, the committee disobligingly cited a recent ICM poll showing a clear English majority believe it wrong, post-devolution, for a Scot to become British prime minister.
The committee noted four solutions usually offered in answer to the West Lothian question - the dissolution of the United Kingdom, English devolution, fewer Scottish MPs or English votes on English laws.
While offering no solution of its own, it "considered it worth noting [ our] concerns, with the hope that the matter will be comprehensively debated and resolved before the situation is reached whereby it could actually undermine the whole devolution settlement".
Scottish National Party MP Angus MacNeill said it must be "some discomfort" to the government that a committee with a Labour majority should reach such conclusions and call for a debate which ministers had suggested was already closed.
Yesterday's ICM poll putting the Conservatives on 37 per cent, ahead of Labour on 32 per cent and the Liberal Democrats on 21 per cent, followed a warning from one of Mr Brown's aides, former minister Michael Wills, that Labour on its current course will lose the next election.