A failed attempt to oust Gordon Brown has damaged the British prime minister and his Labour Party and boosted the opposition Conservatives ahead of an election due by June, according to an opinion poll on Friday, according to Reuters. The poll, in the Sun newspaper, said 67 percent of voters either had no confidence in the ruling Labour Party or less confidence following Wednesday"s unsuccessful putsch. [ID:nUKPOLLS2010 Two former cabinet ministers called for a secret ballot of Labour parliamentarians to decide if Brown, who replaced Tony Blair mid-term in 2007, should lead the party into an election. While the call failed to win any high-level support, analysts and media commentators said Brown would be weakened by the episode and noted that many of his senior colleagues took some time to declare their backing for him. Brown dismissed it as a "storm in a teacup". "This was the worst possible timing for the Labour Party," said Simon Lee, senior politics lecturer at Hull University. Opposition Conservative leader David Cameron described Labour, in power for 13 years, as divided and damaged. The party"s support has been eroded by the debilitating effects of a deep recession and high unemployment and an increasingly bloody war in Afghanistan. CABINET MEETS, WEATHER DISCUSSED The cabinet met on Friday for the first time since the plot was announced and spent much of its time discussing the response to Britain"s worst winter in three decades. Business Secretary Peter Mandelson, one of the most influential figures in the cabinet, said Labour must stick to the centrist message that had helped it to three successive electoral victories. "We are going to offer policies that benefit people in every part of the United Kingdom," he told the BBC. "That"s what we"ve always done when we"ve won and that"s what we"re going to do again. The prime minister is leading us in that." Critics say Brown, 58, lacks charisma and could compare unfavourably with the younger Cameron, a former public relations executive, in election campaigning in which live TV debates will be held for the first time. The YouGov poll, which was taken between 1600 GMT on Wednesday and 1200 GMT on Thursday, showed the Conservatives with 42 percent support. This was up from 40 percent in a poll the newspaper published just a day earlier. Labour slipped to 30 percent from 31 percent in the previous poll and the Liberal Democrats dropped to 16 percent from 17 percent. Such a voting pattern in an election would give the Conservatives a 74-seat majority, the newspaper said. A ComRes poll for the BBC on Friday also found that 50 percent of those questioned thought Labour would have greater appeal if Brown were to step aside. However, 69 percent thought that if he quit there was no obvious more popular candidate. The poll findings helped to ease some of the pressure on sterling. Markets are concerned that the election could produce a weak government or a hung parliament, complicating efforts to cut a record budget deficit.
