Third Victory for Thatcher Seems Assured

British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher on Wednesday appeared set for her third successive victory despite a narrowing lead in the polls the day before today’s general election.

Thatcher would be the first prime minister to win three terms in a row since the Earl of Liverpool in 1826.

Neil Kinnock ended a strong campaign by the main opposition Labor Party by ridiculing the core of Thatcher’s platform: that her 8-year tenure has halted Britain’s economic and national decline.

‘Self-Deluding Vanity’

“What we see in the Tory record is not greatness, but the self-deluding vanity of a fading empress and her courtiers,” the 45-year-old socialist party leader told a London news conference before returning to his native Wales for election day.

The Conservative prime minister, 61, said she needs another term to keep Labor from stripping Britain of its nuclear weapons and restoring sweeping powers to the trade unions, which finance the opposition party.

“People are afraid of the prospect of Britain left defenseless . . . of a return to roaring inflation . . . of the union bosses running the show again,” she said before making a helicopter tour of southern England districts.

Thatcher became Europe’s first woman head of government when her party ousted Labor in 1979.

Alliance Hopes for Split

The centrist Social Democratic-Liberal Party Alliance said its private polls indicated a late swing that would produce a Parliament with no party in the majority. The alliance hopes to hold the balance in such a situation.

In polls taken Tuesday by Marplan and Gallup for newspapers and Harris for the TV-AM network, the Conservatives led by 7-8 points. That was down from an average of 10 earlier in the week but still enough to give Thatcher a third term with an edge of 50 to 60 seats in the 650-member House of Commons.

She won a second term in 1983 with a huge 144-seat lead because Labor failed with a far-left platform, and the Alliance’s involvement split the vote. The vote share then was Conservatives 42.4, Labor 27.6 and Alliance 25.3.

Figures in the latest Harris poll gave the Conservatives 42%, Labor 35% and the Alliance 21%. That would yield the Conservatives 345 seats, down from 397 in 1983; Labor 264, up from 209, and the Alliance 18, down from 23.