LONDON - In expensive suits pinned with bright blue rosettes, the Conservatives are out in number Thursday to greet voters at the town hall, confident that they can knock Labour out of the most contested race in London.
"We haven't seen Labour anywhere!" one woman exclaimed with a flinty smile as she distributed flyers predicting that the Tory hopeful Greg Hands would wrest Hammersmith and Fulham away from the candidate of Prime Minister Tony Blair's party on Thursday.
The west London constituency straddles the capital's economic divide, with well-heeled Fulham in the south and Hammersmith further north, a rapidly gentrifying urban mix of immigrants and middle-class professionals.
Officially it is number 14 on the most-endangered list of Labour seats up for grabs in the general election, after the party held it in 2001 with only a 2,015-vote lead over opposition Conservatives.
But in reality the seat is far more vulnerable -- "neck and neck", according to a Labour leak in the press last week -- because the incumbent, Iain Coleman, stepped down due to illness and was replaced in March by an unknown, 35-year-old Melanie Smallman, who has run a nearly invisible campaign.
"I don't even know her name!" lawyer William Begley, 33, said with a smile, describing how he ditched Labour over its "draconian tax measures".
Hands, in contrast, has been making the rounds for the past 18 months, canvassing the borough with a raft of local promises and armies of Conservative activists.
Among the steady stream of voters at polling stations, Labour diehards were present but surrounded by fiscal conservatives voicing disillusion with Blair's centrist "New Labour" policies and left-leaning residents upset by the war in Iraq.
"On a local level and for the country, we would be on a better track with Conservatives," asserted Dominic Griffiths, a 32-year-old lawyer, at the Fulham town hall.
Chelsea, a pregnant communications director dashing off to work, called her vote for the Conservatives part of a "two-step program" to bring them back in the next round of elections, hopefully "with a new leader in the meantime".
Eight years of Labour leadership "hasn't done much, not for people like us," said Freddie, a 40-year-old printer and decorator in the more run-down setting of a public housing estate.
"Any change is good," he added, bashing Labour but declining to reveal his vote.
Naveed Khan, a 28-year-old sales manager, agreed that what counted was to make a "protest vote".
"I really didn't care who I voted for, as long as it wasn't Labour or the Conservatives," Khan said, sounding off against the Iraq war and revealing that he voted for the anti-war Liberal Democrats but nearly supported the Green Party.
"I voted for the Conservatives, which is not at all my style," journalist Andrew Wolfe admitted. "I can't stand Blair because of all the spin."
But Naomi, a middle-aged accountant, stood up for the prime minister, accusing his rivals of "just going on and on and on about the war."
"Of course I voted Labour!" she added, saying Blair had duly apologized for his "mistake" in dragging Britain into the March 2003 invasion of Iraq.
"That's why I gave him a sympathy vote."
Elaine Commolly, a 60-year-old secretary, also crossed her fingers for the Labour Party, saying, "I just hope they don't lose too many seats."
She said it was novel to vote in such a close race, having come from the nearby Kensington district, so solidly Conservative that "there was no point in voting".
But her vote faces widespread resistance here to the prime minister, like that of David Robertson, a 59-year-old scientist, who vowed he would "never vote for Blair again."
Robertson, who rode up to a Hammersmith polling station on a bicycle, opted for the Greens, saying they were "the least bad of a bad bunch".
"I have a low opinion of politicians now.... There should be a case to tick: 'None of the above'".

05/05/2005 15:54 GMT