Blair also suffered more bad news on the electoral front, with results from by-elections for two vacant parliamentary seats yielding a poor showing for his Labour Party.

Pollsters YouGov, in a survey commissioned by the Daily Telegraph newspaper, found 30 percent of Britons thought new Conservative Party leader David Cameron would make the best prime minister, against 28 percent who preferred Blair.

The Telegraph said it was the first time any of five successive Conservative leaders had been preferred to Blair since Blair took the helm of the Labour party in 1994 as opposition leader under Conservative Prime Minister John Major.

In the Welsh district of Blaenau Gwent, independent Dai Davies defeated a Labour candidate for parliament, thwarting Labour's hopes of winning back one of its heartland seats, which Blair's party lost at the last election last year.

The area had been safely held by Labour for years until Labour stalwart Peter Law quit the party and ran as an independent, refusing to step aside when Labour leaders said the party's candidate must be a woman.

After Law died of cancer, Labour hoped to win the seat back, and dispatched high profile cabinet members to campaign there, to no avail.