August 3, 2003	Sunday	Jumadi-us-Sani 4, 1424

LONDON, Aug 2: Tony Blair became Britain’s longest serving Labour Party prime minister on Saturday, but had little else to celebrate, with an appearance before a suicide inquiry looming and public trust in his government collapsing.

The milestone of six years and three months in government he has now passed eclipses the previous record for prime ministerial tenure set by Clement Attlee from 1945 to 1951.

Mr Blair, who radically modernized his party, dragging it out of 18 years in the political wilderness and leading it to consecutive electoral landslide victories in 1997 and 2001, was holidaying with his family in Barbados.

But as he left the country he learned that he will be summoned later this month to give evidence to a public inquiry into the suicide of a government scientist at the centre of a row over the reasons Britain went to war in Iraq.

And despite a solid economy and low unemployment, Mr Blair has seen his once heroic image tarnished, with growing complaints that his government is far more about spin than substance.

A newspaper poll last week showed that two thirds of Britons see a “culture of deceit” at the heart of his government.

The tabloid Daily Mail newspaper ran an editorial on Saturday headlined “Broken promises, wasted years”.

“This is a government that has frittered away trust, turned hope into cynicism and replaced optimism with resignation...And most damaging of all, nobody today believes a word it says,” the paper added.—Reuters