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Election speculation

mounts in Britain

LONDON: Speculation mounted that British Prime Minister John Major might not be able to hold on to power until next May after a newspaper said on Sunday that two members of his parliamentary party were poised to defect to Labour.

Major's majority in parliament was cut to just one last week when the opposition Labour party won a crushing by-election victory over his Conservatives.

With Labour leader Tony Blair on a roll after a highly publicised visit to the United States, the press report was yet another blow to Major's chances of survival.

The Sunday Times said the two Conservative MPs had told senior advisers to Blair and other leading Labour figures that they were deeply worried about Major's shift to the right under pressure from anti-Europeans in the ruling party.

Major, who must call a general election by May 1997 at the latest, defeated a right-wing challenger for the party leadership last year. But he has still moved to the right to try to unite a party which is deeply split on Europe.

The Sunday Times said the two MPs had decided to defect to Labour if Chancellor of the Exchequer Kenneth Clarke, as was widely rumoured, had quit the cabinet in protest at its promise of a referendum over a European single currency.

After a compromise unveiled 10 days ago -- the referendum would be promised in the Conservative election manifesto but would be held only after a decision to go ahead and join a single currency -- Clarke said he was behind the policy.

But Blair, speaking to the newspaper as he returned from a three-day whirlwind tour of the United States, said he was confident there could still be defectors.

"I certainly have reason to believe there are people who are deeply dissatisfied with the way the Conservative Party is going," said Blair, whose party holds a 30-point lead in opinion polls.

"The One-Nation Conservatives believe in politics led from the centre," he said using a common term for moderate members of the ruling party. "You have to look at today's Conservative party and wonder whether they are in the right party."

Even the staunchly pro-Conservative Mail on Sunday warned that Major's hold on power might be slipping.

"Tories (Conservatives) are facing up to a snap general election," wrote the Mail's political editor, Joe Murphy, saying a secret committee had already been drawing up plans for an election later this year.

Deepening their gloom, a Sunday Times poll said two-thirds of rank and file Conservative members of parliament believed their party would lose the next general election.

One more defection -- two Conservative MPs have recently quit the party, one for Labour and one for the minority Liberal Democrats -- would erase Major's overall majority in parliament.

But he still has 52 more seats than Labour who would have to win the backing of smaller parties to bring down the government.-Reuter