More than one in three want Blair to go
Reuters, London
More than one in three Britons say Prime Minister Tony Blair should resign over the Iraq war but a clear majority do not blame him for the beheading of Kenneth Bigley in Iraq, an opinion poll shows.In the first comprehensive sounding taken since the death of Bigley, the YouGov poll in The Mail yesterday showed 36 percent of voters wanted Blair to step down. But 65 percent said he was not to blame for Bigley's beheading by militants in Iraq, while 59 percent believed the government had done everything it could to secure the engineer's release. "They are not blaming the government for Bigley at all. Blair's problem is trust and what has happened in Iraq generally," YouGov's Peter Kellner told Reuters. Bigley's hometown of Liverpool staged a day of mourning for him on Saturday and Blair rang the family to offer his condolences. Coming soon after a report from the Iraq Survey Group (ISG), which destroyed Blair's main argument for waging war on Iraq, the killing looks certain to keep Iraq at the top of the political agenda seven months before an expected election. Up to 58 percent of those polled by YouGov said they believed the conflict in Iraq had undermined the health of Blair, who underwent an operation on October 1 to quell heart palpitations. Blair has said he will stand for a third term but will not stand for a fourth, an announcement that has aroused fevered speculation over who might succeed him. Despite his plummeting trust ratings, all polls still point to the Labour Party being the comfortable winner of the next election as the opposition Conservatives have failed to capitalise on his woes. The latest poll in The Sunday Telegraph, taken after the Conservatives' annual party conference, showed the opposition party garnering just 30 percent of support -- nine points behind Labour. Writing in the Independent on Sunday, former U.N. weapons inspector Hans Blix accused Blair and President George W. Bush of "clinging to straws" to justify their decision to go to war in Iraq. Both leaders seized on the suggestion by Charles Duelfer, leader of the ISG which hunted in vain for evidence of banned weapons in Iraq after the U.S. invasion, that Saddam Hussein might have started producing weapons of mass destruction again if U.N. sanctions had been lifted. "This is the new straw to which the governments concerned have begun to cling," Blix wrote.
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