It has taken five long years but Britain’s Tony Blair could be facing a dangerous first — a resurgent opposition and a serious slide in his own popularity.

An ICM poll for the Guardian newspaper yesterday showed the Conservatives’ share of the vote rose by four points to 34 percent in the past month, while ruling Labour fell four points to 43, slashing Blair’s lead from 17 points to nine at a stroke.

The prime minister has had a rough ride since storming to re-election last June, stung by criticism that he has travelled the globe after September 11 while ignoring pressing problems back at home.

The government’s help for Indian steel tycoon Lakshmi Mittal after he donated $125,000 ($180,000) to Labour Party coffers has conjured the whiff of sleaze, a factor the premier used to powerful effect to defeat the Conservatives in 1997.

Now Blair is sending 1,700 attack troops to Afghanistan to fight a war that many fear is without point or end.

Yet until now poll ratings for “Teflon Tony” stayed stratospheric, undented by his reserved, balding opponent Iain Duncan Smith, no matter how bad the headlines.

Apart from a blip in 2000, when fuel tax protesters brought the country to a halt by blockading petrol depots, opinion polls have shown the Conservatives’ vote down around 30 percent ever since they were ejected from government.

Until now, that is. Yesterday’s sharp fall in Labour Party support was preceded three weeks ago by a MORI poll that showed Blair’s personal approval rating had fallen to 46 percent — exactly matched by those who disapproved of his record.

“So far the government has had a pretty bad year. A drip-drip cumulation and the feeling that they cannot deliver is now starting to eat into what had been impregnable support,” said Paul Whiteley, professor of politics at Essex University.

Whiteley conducted an in-depth survey of public opinion during last year’s election and found even then a high level of discontent at Blair’s domestic record. Pollsters caution against reading too much into one snapshot but Whiteley added: “This could be the start of a trend.”

Duncan Smith has taken a simple approach — abandoning his party’s divisive obsession with Europe to attack Blair on his failure to improve public services. Blair set himself up for such an attack, mortgaging his political future on better schools, hospitals and policing when he ran for re-election last year. And while Blair is feted abroad for helping to spearhead the US war on terror, at home there is little to cheer him.

The ICM poll indicated that rising concern over street crime meant Labour was losing its reputation as the party of law and order. Chaos on the railways with unreliable services and a series of fatal crashes followed a close second.

On public services, monoliths like the health service and rail network will take years, and billions of pounds, to turn around, yet Finance Minister Gordon Brown is telling ministers that money is tight. Pledging to give the health service whatever it needed, Brown warned other spending departments on Wednesday there would be “no blank cheques” in his April budget, which could see crime-fighting, defence and transport go short.

For all that, facing a near-record Labour majority in parliament, the Conservatives still have a mountain to climb.

But perhaps they have finally begun the journey.

“There is nothing inevitable about a Conservative recovery yet the...party is a phoenix, not a dodo,” senior Conservative Francis Maude wrote in the Spectator magazine on Thursday. — Reuters