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Brit ish Prime Minister Tony Blair's future is under a question mark after he suffered a blow to his authority during a crucial parliamentary vote on university fees, newspapers said today.

Blair won yesterday's ballot on tripling university tuition fees by 316 votes to 311, but the press seized on the narrowness of the victory, noting it was the biggest revolt by MPs in his own Labour party on a domestic issue since Blair took office in 1997.

The leftwing Guardian said in an editorial: "It is a very odd kind of victory in which a government with a nominal majority of 161 scrapes home by five on a major bill in a key policy area. By any conventional standards, this was not a victory but a humiliation".

The vote in the House of Commons came just a day before an inquiry headed by senior judge Brian Hutton was to report on the suicide of David Kelly, the weapons expert at the centre of claims that Downing Street "sexed up" intelligence prior to the Iraq war.

The Times said in an editorial today: " Blair will face the Hutton report today having been shot in the back by some of his own supporters. He is wounded, though not yet fatally".

The Financial Times business daily said that the narrowness of Blair's win raised questions about whether he could now press on with his plans to reform Britain's public services in the run-up to the next election, expected in 2005.

For the rightwing Daily Telegraph, the narrowness of the government's majority was a sign of deep divisions in the Labour party over Blair's "presidential" style.

Some Labour MPs are now openly speculating that he might not lead the party into the next election, the paper said.

"Even if he survives this second ordeal (the Hutton report), the authority of this prime minister, hitherto so dominant, is waning," the Telegraph said in an editorial.

"Next time Blair feels the hand of history on his shoulder, it will be guiding him towards the exit sign".

Like other papers, the Telegraph reported that finance minister Gordon Brown - Blair's longtime rival for power - came to the prime minister's aid at the last minute by persuading leading rebels to back the government in the education vote.

"Who governs Britain? Gordon Brown, apparently," the Telegraph said.

"Last night's damned close-run thing will have confirmed in the minds of Labour MPs what they already suspected: that Blair remains prime minister only by the grace and favour of his Chancellor".

The rightwing Daily Mail's front page headline was "Gordon to the rescue".

Blair had narrowly avoided "political catastrophe", the paper said, but the result "left Gordon Brown looking like the real power in government and fuelled speculation that a change at the top may not be far away".

"Surely the true significance of last night's vote is that trust has broken down between Blair and his party - and it is virtually all down to the fact that he has led Britain into war (in Iraq) on a false prospectus," the Mail added in a comment piece.

"Back from the brink, Tony ... next time listen" was the response of the leftwing Daily Mirror. The paper said that the education vote should be a turning point for the prime minister, and urged Blair to consult his MPs when drawing up policy.

Blair was under pressure again today ahead of the publication of Hutton's report on the events that led Kelly, a respected Ministry of Defence expert on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, to take his own life.

Kelly killed himself in July a few days after he was exposed as the source of a BBC radio report in May which alleged that Downing Street had "sexed up" intelligence in the run-up to the US and British invasion of Iraq last March.

However the Sun daily reported today that the judicial inquiry into the Kelly affair would clear Blair of wrongdoing. – Sapa-AFP.

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