Poll drubbing fears for Brown

The party is expected to fare badly at the ballot boxes on Thursday when the public elects local councils in England as well as the Scottish Parliament and Welsh Assembly.

Mr Blair, who has admitted voters could use the polls to give him a 'kicking', has ruled out declaring when he will quit Downing Street beforehand to take some of the flak.

And the Chancellor - who now looks almost certain to succeed Mr Blair in 10 Downing Street - did not rule out the possibility his drawn-out departure could have helped fuel Labour's unpopularity.

Asked if Thursday's results would be a verdict on just Tony Blair or both of them, he told the Sunday Edition programme: "Well people will be voting on all of us.

"But remember these are local elections in England; they're elections actually not for a UK Government but for the Scottish Parliament, and they're also elections for the Welsh Assembly, I think primarily people will be looking also at the powers that the Assembly and the Parliament has, and what local government's doing, and voting on these things as well."

Questioned as to whether Tony Blair had "hung around too long and damaged you in the process", he replied: "Yes well, that, you have, you have to establish."

The Government was going through a bad "phase", he suggested when asked about poor opinion poll ratings that put the party on a par with low points under Michael Foot. "You go through phases. I mean two years ago or a year ago if you'd been pointing to opinion polls, you'd have got a different result."

He went on: "Look, the only result that matters in the end is when it actually comes to a general election and people decide what they want to do.

"And I believe that over the next period of time this Labour Government will prove that on the economy, where people have more prosperity, on the Health Service, where I believe people will see the benefits of things that we are going to do in the next period of time, on education, where standards have got to rise even faster in our schools, and where we've got to have the discipline and personal responsibility to achieve that, people will see a Labour Government on the side of working people."