British Prime Minister Tony Blair's Labour Party had a bad case of the pre-election jitters yesterday as new opinion polls showed next week's vote could be uncomfortably close, rather than the long-predicted re-election stroll.

With the May 5 election just eight days away, a pair of polls - one conducted privately for Labour - appeared to indicate that the main opposition Conservative Party is rapidly eroding the government's lead. A survey conducted for the Financial Times showed that if people were simply asked which party they supported, Labour had a 10 percentage point lead on the Conservatives, enough for a massive House of Commons majority.

However, when this question was addressed only to those who said they would definitely turn out and vote, the Labour lead was cut back to just 2pc, an uncomfortably small margin for Blair and his ministers. The survey threatened to "throw a wobbly into the election", said Robert Worcester, the veteran head of polling firm Mori, who has been measuring opinion in British elections for more than 30 years.

"The size of the (Labour) party's victory all depends on the turnout next week," he wrote in the Financial Times.

According to a separate report in the Guardian, similar worries are reflected in Labour's own private polling.

An internal report compiled by party election organisers said that a low turnout could badly hit the government in parliamentary seats where the race between Labour and other parties was especially close.

A small number of such "marginal" constituencies are always crucial in British elections, since under the voting system the bulk of constituencies tend to strongly back the same party time after time.

The Labour report cited four example marginal seats where the party hoped to hold off the Conservatives, and warned that the race was currently "neck and neck" in each of them, the Guardian said.

"It is the number of definite-to-votes who will make or break this election," Labour's election co-ordinator Alan Milburn told the paper.

He warned supporters yesterday that voter apathy could cost the party a third term in office

A new Conservative campaign poster unveiled accuses the prime minister of lying. "If he's prepared to lie to take us to war, he's prepared to lie to win an election," it says.

l Blair, Conservative leader Michael Howard and the Liberal Democrats' Charles Kennedy will appear on BBC's Question Time programme today to face 30 minutes of quizzing from a live audience in London.

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Tony Blair. (AFP)