"Teflon Tony" unscathed by war's opponents
By Jeremy Lovell
Tuesday October 16, 04:06 PM

LONDON (Reuters) - Prime Minister Tony Blair is relishing his role as world statesman and even opponents of Britain's backing for U.S. action admit they cannot touch a man whose popularity matches Winston Churchill's in World War Two.


Nor does the anti-war movement see any chink in his armour unless fears of mass civilian deaths in Afghanistan or reprisals at home come true.


"I haven't seen any sign at all yet of any slippage in the public mood," MORI pollster Roger Mortimore told Reuters on Tuesday.


Support for Blair's backing of the U.S.-led air strikes against Afghanistan's ruling Taliban has remained at around 70 percent, Mortimore said.


At the same time, support for the anti-war lobby has remained static at around 20 percent -- a significant minority but one that poses no more than a minor irritation to the Labour government with its 167-seat parliamentary majority.


Blair, lead agent in helping Washington build its coalition, seems unassailable as he jets from one capital to the next, riding high on the knowledge he is the most popular prime minister since Churchill during World War Two.


The rating outstrips that of predecessors Margaret Thatcher in the 1982 Falklands War against Argentina and John Major in the 1991 Gulf War, according to an ICM poll.


Mortimore said support might only waver if there were verified reports of major civilian casualties from the air raids or counter-attacks in Britain.


A Mori poll taken after the September 11 suicide attacks on New York and Washington, but before the air raids, showed support for military action would drop substantially if civilian casualties rose on a large scale.


The first footage of civilian casualties has begun emerging from behind Taliban lines but has not yet fed into the polls, which might also move against Blair if the war widens.


"What happens in Afghanistan is going to determine what happens to public opinion in Britain," Mortimore said.


"Although there is very solid support for attacking Afghanistan, there is much less support for extending the war for example to Iraq," he added.


QUESTIONS REMAIN UNANSWERED


An anti-war protest in London on Saturday attracted more than 20,000 people, astonishing even the organisers.


But a spokesman for the lead group, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, said he did not expect it to develop the same momentum as the anti-Vietnam War demonstrations of the 1960s.


"There were anti-war demonstrations during the Gulf War, but the first was the biggest and numbers dwindled after that," CND spokesman Nigel Chamberlain told Reuters.


The movement's key questions -- the validity of trying to bomb terrorism which is a concept not a country, and the morality of lobbing million dollar missiles at one of the world's poorest nations -- remained unanswered.


But the key difficulty, Chamberlain said, was the movement had failed to offer a viable alternative to military action.


Given that Blair decided to take the country to war without a vote or substantive debate among lawmakers on the issue, Chamberlain said Blair's real enemy might lie within.


Critics point to Blair's presidential demeanour in a parliamentary system and say his biggest headache may come from within the ranks of his own war-leery Labour party.


"There are Labour members of parliament from the 1997 intake who sat loyally through the first four years in power but are now starting to question Blair's style," Chamberlain said.