BRITAIN: Labour's crisis of confidence over Tony Blair's leadership continued yesterday with a second poll confirming the "David Cameron effect" in delivering the most sustained Conservative revival for 13 years.
Like the ICM survey earlier in the week, yesterday's YouGov poll showed the Conservatives with 38 per cent support - six points rather than four ahead of Labour - and again with supporting evidence that the Tories are overtaking the governing party on key issues, including some previously thought safe for Labour, such as education, pensions, transport, the environment and global warming.
On the surface all appeared calm as YouGov recorded Mr Blair's lowest ever satisfaction rating in any regular survey and his party "tracking downwards" on all the pollster's monthly indicators.
Seeming still resolute, the prime minister was enjoying his continued standing on the world stage, urging reforms to make the UN a force for multilateral action on global issues.
Back home, meanwhile, Labour MPs returned to their constituencies for the Whitsun recess knowing that two-thirds of British voters think Mr Blair now presides over "a floundering regime".
Blair loyalists and Labour managers will be hoping such findings amount to little more than mid-term blues resulting from months of damaging headlines that culminated this week in home secretary John Reid's admission that the immigration service is "not fit for purpose" after nine years of Labour government.
However, the underlying trends of the Guardian and Daily Telegraph surveys suggest those headlines - paedophiles in classrooms, illegal immigrants cleaning Home Office premises, the foreign prisoners release fiasco, the police investigation into "loans for peerages", Tessa Jowell's mortgages and her husband's finances, Patricia Hewitt's mauling by healthcare workers, a botched cabinet reshuffle and John Prescott's reduction to a figure of fun - have seriously eroded public confidence in Labour's competence.
And while a truce of sorts has been declared by those impatient to see Chancellor Gordon Brown move into Number 10, continuing evidence that Mr Blair has become an electoral liability could trigger renewed pressure on him to declare his intention to stand down ahead of council and devolved Scottish and Welsh elections next May.
Traditionalist right-wing critics of Mr Cameron, meanwhile, have again been silenced by evidence that Labour may be losing support among women voters, while Mr Cameron's "Green is Blue" pitch for the centre ground has compounded the problems of Menzies Campbell's faltering leadership of the Liberal Democrats.