Blair's decision to support US President George W. Bush in the Iraq war has cost him much of his credibility at home. According to a poll in the Sunday Times, 57 percent of the population would not trust him to lead them into another war and 46 percent think he deliberately bloated the menace of presumed weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

Despite such widespread distrust, however, Blair remains the favorite to win the next parliamentary elections, which could occur as early as next spring, if only because people do not see the main Conservative opposition party as a viable alternative.

After the damning reports on the genesis of the Iraq war in both Washington and London, "it is surprising (Bush and Blair) are not even doing worse. The chief reason is that the only opponents with a hope of replacing them remain caught on the hook of their original support for the war," the Financial Times said.

Conservative party leader Michael Howard attempted to wriggle off that hook Sunday by telling the weekly Sunday Times that he would not have backed the government's decision to invade Iraq had he known that the intelligence on Iraq's weapons was so flawed.

"If I knew then what I know now, that would have caused a difficulty," he was quoted as saying.

A year after the suicide of arms expert David Kelly - the source of a BBC report that accused the government of "sexing up" its dossier on Iraq -- the report by Lord Butler showed indeed that the government had only meager and paltry grounds for believing Baghdad to have been an immediate threat.

The press has widely placed Blair's sincerity in cause, and has called on him to show some contrition for the government assault on the BBC's integrity.

But the Butler report did not directly blame the government for the weakness of the evidence on Iraqi weapons, and Blair appears to be hoping that the crisis is at an end.

After saying he took entire responsibility for any mistakes committed, he is now attempting to close the entire affair by shifting the focus to domestic politics, where he hopes to be able to boost his popularity by exploiting what the government claims to be successes in the economy and in fighting insecurity.

Blair's entourage has been busy spinning his determination to lead the Labour party in the next general elections in search of a third consecutive mandate, rather than cede control to his ambitious finance minister, Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown.

The two by-elections on Thursday indicated that Blair may no longer be able to expect the commanding victories he has won in the past two general elections.

In the Leicester constituency, the Labour party was defeated by the Liberal Democrats.

In the Birmingham Hodge Hill constituency, Labor just scraped in ahead of the Liberal Democrat candidate. In both cases, the Conservatives finished third.

If this result was at least partly good news for Blair, the prime minister still has one hurdle ahead before he can write finis to the Iraq affair and start rebuilding his political fortunes.

That is the parliamentary debate on the Butler report scheduled for Tuesday, which he hopes will be the last word on the matter.

"Surely there must come a time when there is finality," said the Labour member of parliament Donald Anderson, chairman of the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee.

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