With poll boost, Brown becomes UK Labour leader

London, June 24: Britain's incoming Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, takes the helm of the ruling Labour Party today with a new poll showing Labour leading the opposition Conservatives for the first time in eight months.

Three days before he is due to take over as prime minister from Tony Blair, Brown will set out his agenda in his first speech as Labour leader at the party conference in Manchester later today.

''To hear that we're up in the polls today after being in (power) ten years? Tell me any other government that's won three elections and is increasing in the polls,'' boasted outgoing deputy prime minister John Prescott.

Brown will find out today whom the party has elected to replace Prescott as his deputy as party leader, a wrinkle which could reveal hints of the makeup of his new government.

The new government is expected to include several familiar names from the Blair years, with former Foreign Minister Jack Straw likely to return to a big job.

But Brown will also be keen to distance himself from his predecessor, whose popularity has slid over the war in Iraq and party funding scandals after 10 years in power.

Labour has badly lagged young rival David Cameron's revived Conservatives in polls since last October. But the new poll, in the Observer newspaper, put support for Labour at 39 per cent and the Conservatives at 36 per cent.

Forty percent of voters believed Brown would make a more capable prime minister, compared to just 22 per cent who prefer Cameron, the poll said.

Brown's supporters hope his stature as a veteran heavyweight will help him beat back a challenge from Cameron, who has overseen a revival for the Conservatives in opinion polls after three straight election defeats to Blair.

The often acrimonious rivalry between the charismatic Blair and the more cerebral but no less ambitious Brown has dominated British politics throughout the Blair years.

The two men agreed to work together to reform the party in the early 1990s and led it to power, with Brown standing aside to let Blair be prime minister first, in the expectation that Blair would eventually pass on the baton.

Blair announced last autumn that he would leave office this summer, but only after a group of Brown supporters in parliament wrote a letter calling for him to resign.

REUTERS

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