Labour can win fourth term - Straw

Mr Straw said that voters had wanted to "punish" Prime Minister Gordon Brown - before hurriedly correcting himself to say "punish us" - for the scrapping of the 10p tax rate.

"They wanted to punish him - or punish us in respect of the 10p," he told the BBC Radio 4 Today programme.

"Those it has affected, it has affected adversely and those people are understandably very upset about why it is that a Government that has cared and continues to care very much about lower-paid people should be doing this."

Mr Straw warned that the Government must make "fewer mistakes", but at the same time he stressed that it should not allow itself to be blown off course.

"What we have to do is actually maintain the strategy that we have followed because it is a strategy that has produced much more effective management as a whole over the last 11 years," he said.

While he insisted that Labour could go on to win the next General Election, he appeared to indicate that Mr Brown would now wait until the last possible moment in 2010 to go to the country.

"I am very clear that the situation in two years time will be different from where we are today," he said.

"There are plenty of Governments that lost the degree of vote that we lost in London and then went on to win a General Election after that.

"When you come to a General Election what people are doing is applying themselves directly to who should form the next Government and I think the choices will be very different from what has unquestionably been partly a protest vote in the mid-term."