Blair wins historic third term

Glad to see he won, but his party on the whole didn’t do so well:

Tony Blair won a historic third term as prime minister Thursday but his Labour Party suffered a sharply reduced parliamentary majority in apparent punishment for going to war in Iraq, according to projections based on exit polls. A chastened Blair said “we will have to respond to that sensibly and wisely.”

Such an outcome, if confirmed by the actual vote count, could set the stage for Blair to be replaced in midterm by a party rival such as Gordon Brown. As Treasury chief, Brown was widely credited for the strong economy that appears to have clinched Labour’s victory, outweighing the bitterness many voters said they felt over Iraq.