More than half of Britons believe British Prime Minister Tony Blair cannot be trusted, according to a poll published a day after he dismissed claims of misleading the country over the war in Iraq.
A total of 59% of Britons believe Blair cannot be trusted, compared with 27% who say he can, according to a YouGov poll in The Daily Telegraph newspaper on Friday.
Blair put his personal credibility on the line on Thursday over charges that his government exaggerated the case for war in Iraq, saying he would have resigned if that had been true.
”If it were true it would have meant that we had behaved in the most disgraceful way, and I would have had to resign as prime minister,” Blair told a judicial inquiry into the presumed suicide of weapons expert David Kelly.
The Ministry of Defence named Kelly as the source of a BBC report that the government ”sexed up” a September 2002 dossier on Iraq and weapons of mass destruction to help justify going to war.
The scientist’s body was found with a slit wrist in woodland near his home on July 18, a week after he was outed as the source.
According to the YouGov poll, 47% of respondents said their opinion of Blair had gone down as a result of the inquiry into Kelly’s death while the figure was 54% in relation to Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon.
A total of 36% said their opinion of the BBC had fallen.
In relation to the government as a whole, only 22% felt ”it has, on balance, been honest and trustworthy”, a fall of two percentage points since July, before the Kelly inquiry opened.
Meanwhile, the opposition Conservatives have failed to capitalise on the row over Iraq, making just one percentage point gain on the Labour government in the past month.
According to the poll, 37% of respondents said they would vote Labour should a national election be held tomorrow, the same as in July, while 35% said they would back the Conservative party, up from 34%.
YouGov interviewed 2 365 British adults online between Tuesday and Thursday. — Sapa-AFP