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Campaign analysis: Monday April 25
Daniel Forman's daily diary of the election campaign.
Monday April 25, 12:00pm
George Galloway likes to claim that Iraq is "only one issue" in this election in the same way that "Everest is only one mountain".
The anti-war Respect candidate has his own good reasons for wanting that to be the case but he has a point.
The shadow of the overthrow of Saddam Hussein has loomed over Labour's second term and remains a threat to securing a healthy majority for a third.
The Liberal Democrats revived the issue this morning and Michael Howard made a pre-emptive strike on this attack with his own sideswipe at the prime minister on Sunday.
The trouble for the Tories on this topic was neatly encapsulated in the Conservative chief's fine soundbite.
"He's only taken a stand on one thing in the last eight years - taking Britain to war - and he couldn't even tell the truth about that," he said, combining admiration and assault in one sentence.
The Tories know that by backing the war they blocked off a potential vote-winning route.
But they also know that what is troubling Labour is not that the war is an election issue per se in all but a minority of constituencies with large Asian populations in areas such as East London, Leicester and Birmingham.
Rather it is that the issues of Iraq and trust in Tony Blair cannot be disconnected.
Swing voters have gradually lost faith in Blair as a result of a failure to live up to high expectations and perceived broken promises on tuition fees and tax. The non-discovery of weapons of mass destruction was the icing on this cake, even for many supporters of the war.
Howard has tried to tie the Tories into this line of thinking. But he found it a tricky path to tread.
The Lib Dem position is much more clear cut. After receiving almost daily abuse in the Commons for his anti-war stance at the time of the conflict, Charles Kennedy is now reaping the benefits of what has turned out to be a popular position.
His two problems are making the case that his party has more to offer than opposition to a foreign policy decision and trying to argue that he would not simply have left Saddam in power.
But having sought to tackle both these problems the beauty of his approach is that it can be deployed in both Lib Dem-Labour and Lib Dem-Tory marginals.
Blair's response to his trust issues has been sophisticated - emphasising other members of his team, promising not to stand again and arguing that he was in a no-win position on Iraq.
However as long as WMD remain unfound and the attorney general's advice on the legality of war remains unpublished that cloud of suspicion will remain.
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