More anguish for Blair

Labour lost Leicester South, which it had held almost without break for the past five decades, to a candidate from the vehemently anti-Iraq war Liberal Democrat party.

Shortly beforehand it was announced that Labour had narrowly squeaked through in a parallel poll in the nearby city of Birmingham, also central England.

However there, Labour's majority of almost 12,000 votes in the last general election of 2001 was shaved to less than 500, a massive 26-percent vote swing away from the party.

The twin polls -- sparked by the death of one MP and the departure of another for a top job in Europe -- had been billed as a plebiscite on Blair's rule, and especially his support for the US-led war in Iraq.

Iraq was viewed as especially significant given that both Leicester and Birmingham have a high proportion of Muslim, Hindu and Sikh voters of South Asian origin, many of whom opposed the war.

The voting on Thursday came only a day after an official report concluded that Blair led the country into the conflict on the basis of largely unreliable intelligence about Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction (WMDs).

The inquiry led by former top civil servant Lord Butler did, however, clear the government of deliberately trying to hype the case for war.

But victorious Liberal Democrat candidate Parmjit Singh Gill said his local population, more than a third of whom are of South Asian origin, had other ideas.

"Yesterday, Lord Butler gave his views on Tony Blair's reasoning for backing the invasion of Iraq. Today, people in Leicester have given theirs," Gill said after the result was announced.

Blair argued that the war to remove Saddam Hussein was necessary almost entirely on the basis that Baghdad posed a direct threat to the West, and his popularity slumped after no WMDs came to light after the war.