BRITAIN: Labour is not the only party worried about the this week's polls, writes Frank Millar in London.
Tony Blair might get lucky this week and find himself sharing the bad election news with the Conservative and Liberal Democrat leaders Michael Howard and Charles Kennedy. Indeed all three (two Scots and one Welshman) might be praying David Beckham leads England to Euro 2004 glory against France on Sunday night, so relegating the results of Britain's European elections on the front pages of next Monday morning's newspapers.
England may expect but all the three leaders know for certain is that they face a long wait. The polling stations close at 10pm on Thursday night. By close of play on Friday we will have the results of the contests for some 6,000 council seats in England and Wales, as well the outcome of the elections for London Mayor and the 25-member London Assembly. However the first European results from England and Wales cannot be declared until after 9pm on Sunday night - after the rest of Europe has voted - while Scotland and Northern Ireland will not declare until Monday.
So four full days will elapse before we know to what extent the voters have punished the Blair government for everything from the war in Iraq to the European Constitution, soaring council tax bills, stealth taxes and poor public services; and whether the collapse of support in Labour marginals is sufficient to spark real (as opposed to media) talk about an anti-Blair rebellion inside the Parliamentary Labour Party at Westminster.
Or, alternatively, that the results provoke fresh questions about Mr Kennedy's health and his appetite for the job, while the Conservative "success" is blunted by the upward march of Robert Kilroy Silk's United Kingdom Independence Party.
If some of the opinion polls are to be believed, indeed the only thing we may know for certain is that the rising tide of Euroscepticism will make still-more difficult Mr Blair's task in winning any referendums on the EU Constitution or British membership of the Euro. That apart, this week's results may actually tell us very little about the future direction of British politics. 'Super Thursday' as it is being called may provide the biggest test of opinion since the 2001 general election.
However a relatively low turnout would probably render any attempted read-across to the next election meaningless.
In truth it was always going to be difficult for the Conservatives to better their 1999 performance, not least because the UK has been reduced from 87 to 78 seats in the new parliament. William Hague claimed a splendid victory on that occasion, taking 36 per cent of the vote and nearly half the seats. Yet it proved worthless two years later, when Mr Blair won his historic second full term for Labour.
According to yesterday's YouGov poll the Conservatives might still top the poll this time, but with the UKIP eating into their vote and threatening to take 13 or more seats. And so, with a terrible sense of déjà vu, the final days of the Conservative campaign have been played-out to the sound of rancour and recrimination.
Noting Iain Duncan Smith's "one achievement" in stopping the party talking about Europe, former defence secretary Michael Portillo says observing the evolving Tory tactics "has been like watching a train crash in slow motion." Others, too, shared his view that the decision to elevate the UKIP challenge (Mr Howard devoted a speech to this last week) "would communicate nothing to the electorate except the smell of fear." From the Conservative Europhile wing meanwhile, former minister David Curry yesterday denounced Mr Howard's depiction of an emerging "country called Europe" for being "miles from the mark." Mr Curry excoriated Mr Blair, too, for his failure over seven years to make good his promise to end Britain's "ambiguous" relationship with the rest of Europe. But Europe is a problem for another day. One fancies Mr Blair would be rather less worried by the election of Mr Kilroy Silk than by a success for former Labour MP George Galloway, seeking election in London under the anti-war coalition banner 'Respect' (though presumably with less emphasis now on his previous respect for Saddam Hussein's indefatigability).
So Labour losses - but masked by a lack of conspicuous Tory success, and a rebuff for the Lib Dems who chose to make this European contest a referendum on the war? Mr Blair could certainly live with that.