LABOUR today begins the 2001 General Election campaign with a 13 per cent lead in key marginal seats in the North, The Northern Echo can reveal.

Yesterday, Prime Minister Tony Blair said he was seeking "a mandate for fresh, radical change", as he confirmed June 7 would be polling day.

But one of the most striking findings of The Northern Echo's phone poll, of 2,222 voters in four constituencies, is that nearly a third have yet to make up their minds.

Our poll in the traditionally marginal seats of Stockton South, Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland, and Scarborough and Whitby - and also in Hartlepool where the sitting MP Peter Mandelson has been dogged by controversy - gives Labour 38 per cent of the vote, the Conservatives 25 per cent, the Liberal Democrats 4.5 per cent, with the 'Don't Knows' on 31.5 per cent.

After asking the Queen to approve his plans to dissolve Parliament on Monday, the Prime Minister made public the election date in a hastily-convened but carefully-choreographed speech at a south London school yesterday afternoon.

He said he approached the election "with a sense of both humility and hope" and added that the gap between the parties was now "probably more fundamental and more stark than at any time since 1983".

He addressed concerns that, despite Labour's big lead in the polls, there were still a lot of voters unsure about whether his party deserved a second term of office, saying the campaign "is not just to win your vote - it is to win your heart and your mind for the change our country needs to face the challenges of the future".

For the first time in modern history, the two main party leaders represent adjoining constituencies, with only the River Tees between Croft and Hurworth, to the south of Darlington, standing between them. The Northern Echo is in the unique position of being the local paper for both party leaders.

Tory leader William Hague, the MP for Richmond on the south side of the Tees, launched the Conservative campaign with a soapbox address in which he promised to "give you back your country".

A beaming Mr Hague, with wife Ffion in Watford town centre, Hertfordshire, insisted that despite opinion polls putting his party up to 18 points behind Labour, he was confident of victory.

He identified crime, taxes, discipline in schools and Europe as key issues on which he will fight.

Mr Hague told cheering supporters: "When Tony Blair called the election this afternoon, he wasn't so much running on his record as running away from his record, not so much asking for a second term as asking for a second chance."

Liberal Democrat leader Charles Kennedy said: "A government which is stressing the need for humility does itself have quite a lot to be humble about. We are going to put quality service delivery in the public sector at the heart of our campaign."

But in his speech at St Saviour's and St Olave's Church of England School for Girls, Mr Blair said that his 1997 landslide "was never a reason to do the job quickly but to do it properly, for the long term".

He summed up his appeal: "So the work goes on and now I seek a mandate not simply for more of the same. I seek a fresh mandate for fresh and radical change."

Election fever moves to the Commons tomorrow for the last Prime Minister's Question Time of this parliament, in what is bound to be a bearpit atmosphere.

Read more about the election here here.