LONDON, July 16: Under-fire British Prime Minister Tony Blair received another unwelcome reminder of his falling popularity on Friday as his Labour party lost a formerly safe parliamentary seat and narrowly retained another in a pair of key by-elections.

Labour lost Leicester South, which it had held almost without break for the past five decades, to a candidate from the vehemently anti-Iraq war Liberal Democrat party. The party narrowly squeaked through in a parallel poll in the nearby city of Birmingham, also central England.

However there, Labour's majority of almost 12,000 votes in the last general election of 2001 was shaved to less than 500, a massive 26-percent vote swing away from the party.

Blair's Health Secretary John Reid said the results had been "satisfactory". "In the seventh year of a government, especially after the circumstances of this week which weren't the best circumstances for us... to have a score draw with the Liberal Democrats was not a terrible result for us, it was a satisfactory one," Reid told the independent GMTV channel.

The voting on Thursday came a day after an official report concluded that Blair led the country into the conflict on the basis of largely unreliable intelligence about Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction (WMDs).

The inquiry led by former top civil servant Lord Butler did, however, clear the government of deliberately trying to hype the case for war. But victorious Liberal Democrat candidate Parmjit Singh Gill said his local population, more than a third of whom are of South Asian origin, had other ideas.

"Lord Butler gave his views on Tony Blair's reasoning for backing the invasion of Iraq. Today, people in Leicester have given theirs," Gill said after the result was announced.

The twin polls - sparked by the death of one MP and the departure of another for a top job in Europe - had been billed as a plebiscite on Blair's rule and his support for last year's US-led war in Iraq.

Iraq was viewed as especially significant given that both Leicester and Birmingham have a high proportion of Muslim, Hindu and Sikh voters of South Asian origin, many of whom opposed the war.

Blair argued that the war to remove Saddam Hussein was necessary almost entirely on the basis that Baghdad posed a direct threat to the West, and his popularity slumped after no WMDs came to light after the war.

This has been reflected in earlier voting, with Labour losing another formerly rock-solid seat to the Liberal Democrats in a by-election last year and taking a terrible beating in local and European elections last month.

The new reverses will ratchet up recent speculation that Blair's respected finance minister Gordon Brown could be considering an internal coup to oust the prime minister. - AFP