LONDON: The leader of the main opposition Conservatives, Michael Howard, yesterday announced he would step down after a stinging election defeat at the hands of Prime Minister Tony Blair’s Labour Party.

The Conservatives wrested dozens of parliament seats from Labour, but the party’s share of the popular vote rose only one percentage point from its showing in the 2001 election, to slightly more than 33%.

With 627 of 646 House of Commons constituencies counted at 2.40pm (1340 GMT) yesterday, the Tories had won 197 parliamentary seats.

They were expected to reach as many as 200 seats, but the final tally will still be fewer than the 209 Labour won in 1983 against prime minister Margaret Thatcher, then considered a benchmark for disaster in British election history.

“I’ve said that if people don’t deliver, they go. And for me, delivering meant winning the elections. I didn’t do that,” Howard said in a midday speech, standing next to his wife Sandra.

“I want to do now what is best for my party and, above all, for my country,” he added.

The 63-year-old, a former Cabinet minister who took the reins of the party 18 months ago, said he would go ‘sooner rather than later’ but would stay long enough for the Tories to modify their system for choosing a new leader.

Howard was the fourth person chosen to try to restore the Tories’ standing since 1997, when it was ousted from 18 straight years in power, mostly under Thatcher.

Analysts said his controversial campaign tactics, including personal attacks on Blair and populist rhetoric on immigration, had not helped sway voters.

“The Conservatives have ‘flatlined’ three elections running,” said Bob Worcester, chairman of the MORI polling institute.

Ahead of the first two Labour victories, in 1997 and 2001, the party had focused on Europe, ‘appealing to the ‘little Englanders’,’ Worcester said.

“In this election, immigration and taxes appealed to their core vote. The public reacted badly, both to the imagery of the Conservatives being the ‘nasty party’, and voted for the welfare state, even at the cost of higher taxes.”

During campaigning, Howard had called Blair a ‘liar’ - a rare personal attack in British politics - over the premier’s arguments ahead of the Iraq war.

But the Conservatives failed to turn the massive unpopularity of the war to their benefit since they had also backed the US-British invasion in March 2003, Oxford University’s Christopher Wlezien recalled.

“Tony Blair took an unpopular stance over Iraq, but the Conservatives couldn’t benefit much from the issue,” he said, adding that the anti-war Liberal Democratic Party had picked up the protest votes instead.

John Curtice of the University of Strathclyde, in Scotland, agreed that the Tories had failed to emerge from their electoral ‘black hole’, but said that immigration had been the ‘one and only popular tune’ which seemed to appeal to voters.

“They lost despite their immigration policy, not because of it,” he said.

But Conservatives were to blame for not taking advantage of a public and a press tired and mistrustful of Blair, according to Michael Bruter of the London School of Economics.

“They had everything they needed to succeed, with a Labour Party weary after eight years in power, the press running hard against Tony Blair.... But this puts them back to ground zero, where they were in 2001,” Bruter said.

“The apparent progress in terms of their parliamentary seats poorly disguises what is a complete stagnation in terms of popular votes,” he said, calling the election showing a ‘failure’. – AFP