LONDON — Voters in England on Thursday turned apparently innocuous local elections into a stinging rebuke of British Prime Minister Tony Blair.
Blair's Labor government, whose popularity was dented in 2003 by its support for the Iraq war, has faced a barrage of criticism in the last week over the bungled release of foreign convicts, hospital staff cuts and his married deputy's acknowledgment of an affair.
By 5 a.m. today, with more than three-quarters of votes counted, Labor had lost 231 of the seats it held among the more than 4,300 contested -- many more than the 100 or so it had been resigned to shedding. The party suffered particularly heavy losses in London, a traditional stronghold.
The biggest gainers were the opposition Conservatives, on their first electoral outing under new leader David Cameron, who was keen to prove that his party was on the way back to power. The Conservatives gained 239 seats.
Far-right anti-immigration parties, boosted by the emergence of violent crime committed by foreigners as an election issue, were among smaller parties that also gained ground.
In what appeared to be an attempt to deflect attention from the scale of the reversal, Blair moved forward a planned Cabinet reshuffle that had been expected next week.
His Cabinet colleague Geoff Hoon, leader of the lower house of Parliament, told BBC television that he expected the reshuffle to take place today.
But Labor lawmaker Frank Dobson was quoted on Sky News as saying that any ministerial swaps now would only be "rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic."
Local councils run municipal services -- schools, parking, garbage collection, town planning -- and voting patterns generally reflect local concerns. But with tensions high on the national political stage, Thursday's poll was seen more broadly as a referendum on the prime minister's future.
"I voted Conservative," 45-year-old David Phillips, a lawyer, said as he left a polling station in Camden, North London, which with neighboring Islington lays claim to being the spiritual home of the "new" Labor that Blair modernized in the 1990s. "I wouldn't vote Labor. I used to think they were either incompetent or corrupt. Now I think they're both."
The local election campaign was overshadowed by a flurry of controversies at the national level.
