The campaign for this week’s crucial by-election in West London slid into personal abuse and bitterness yesterday as rival parties tried to exploit Tory embarrassment over its candidate posing with Tony Blair.

Labour branded Tony Lit unsuitable to be the area’s MP and called him a “Tory playboy”. He was photographed only last month at a Labour fundraising event with Mr Blair.

Meanwhile, the Liberal Democrats tried to stamp themselves as the main challenger to Labour in Thursday’s contest in Ealing Southall. Today they will send out 45,000 copies of a campaign newspaper carrying the picture of Mr Lit with Mr Blair, hoping to attract both disaffected Conservatives and Labour voters still upset about Mr Blair’s role in the Iraq war.

The Conservatives tried to play down the disclosure that Mr Lit’s Asian radio station, Sunrise, paid £4,800 to Labour for the table where Mr Lit and his father, Avtar, sat with, among others, Stephen Pound, the Labour MP for Ealing North.

Mr Pound compounded Tory discomfort yesterday by suggesting that Mr Lit had shown little interest in politics at the dinner and that his father had successfully bid £4,000 — apparently for payment to a charity, not Labour — for the pleasure of going to a fundraising dinner in the United States attended by Hillary Clinton.

Mr Lit, who has since left Sunrise, said that he had attended the event for the Asian business community. “But like many British Asians I feel the Labour Government does not have the answers to the challenges that currently face the country.”

A Conservative spokesman said: “This was a dinner organised for Asian businesses and Sunrise Radio attended. Tony Lit has always been a Conservative voter.”

The Labour leaflet said that Mr Lit was “out of touch” and had no experience of solving local people’s problems.

Liberal Democrat attempts to establish the party as the main challenger to Labour have been hindered by the high-profile Conservative campaign. Yesterday the party made plans to produce 45,000 copies of a campaign tabloid newspaper carrying the photograph of Mr Lit with Mr Blair. Lib Dem literature has already featured pictures of President Bush with Mr Blair, even though he is no longer Prime Minister, based on the party’s belief that many ethnic minority voters associate him with the invasion of Iraq.

Lord Rennard, the Lib Dems’ chief executive, who is running the campaign in Ealing Southall, told The Times: “If Labour are ahead, then the way they can now be beaten will be if former Conservative supporters now switch to the Liberal Democrats.”

He said that about 500 Liberal Democrat campaigners had been delivering leaflets and canvassing voters in Ealing Southall over the weekend, led by Sir Menzies Campbell and Simon Hughes, the party president.

The party has a huge campaign headquarters on a Southall industrial estate and has quietly been mounting an intensive leaflet-based campaign.

Clearly, although without making this explicit, the party has been putting much greater effort into the Ealing Southall by-election than into the other contest taking place on Thursday — the by-election in Sedgefield, Mr Blair’s former seat.

Ealing Southall

Candidates

Nigel Bakhai Liberal Democrat
John Sydney Cartwright Official Monster Raving Loony Party
Sati Chaggar English Democrats
Salvinder Singh Dhillon Respect
Sarah Janet Edwards Green
Kuldeep Singh Grewal Independent
Tony Lit Conservative
Yakub Masih Christian Party
Jasdev Singh Rai Independent
KT Rajan UK Independence Party
Virendra Kumar Sharma Labour
Gulbash Singh Independent

2005 General Election

Piara Khabra, Labour 22,937 (48.8 per cent);
Nigel Bakhai, Lib Dem 11,497 (24.4 per cent);
Mark Nicholson, Conservative 10,147 (21.6 per cent);
Sarah Edwards, Green 2,175 (4.6 per cent);
Malkiat Bilku, Workers’ Revolutionary Party 289 (0.6 per cent).

Majority: 11,440
Turnout: 56.2 per cent

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