The scale of the election gamble confronting Gordon Brown is revealed tonight in a Guardian ICM poll showing the Labour lead has been slashed to one point, a drop of seven points since the Guardian polled at the start of the conference season.

The poll was conducted after David Cameron had completed his much-hailed conference speech in Blackpool. But Labour aides said last night they had identified the source of the surge as the Tory announcement on inheritance tax and the promise that only millionaires would have to pay death duties.

The poll shows the main two parties neck and neck after a summer and autumn in which Labour appeared to be pulling away from Mr Cameron, a trend that prompted Mr Brown’s aides to urge him to call a November 1 poll next week. Last night Labour MPs in marginal seats were said to be very nervous about a snap election.

The new ICM poll, from a sample of 977 people, shows Labour on 39%, Conservatives 38% and Liberal Democrats 16%. Tory support has climbed six points since last month’s Guardian/ICM poll, returning to the level it reached a year ago at the end of the party conference season.

Today’s figure is also the Conservative party’s highest ICM score since March, when it held a strong lead over Labour as Tony Blair prepared to depart.

Two other tests of opinion last night, one for YouGov conducted for Channel 4 and another by Populus for the Times, also reveal a dramatic tightening of the Labour lead.

YouGov shows the Labour lead cut from eleven to four points with Labour on 40%, the Conservatives on 36% and the Lib Dems on 13%. Other parties are on 11%. Populus puts Labour on 39% ( down two points), Tories 36% (up five) and Lib Dems 14% (down two).

The Brown camp was not last night signalling that plans for the election will be definitely pulled in the wake of these polls, but his election team was suggesting more strongly than before that its private polling in the key marginal seats showed the Conservatives doing comparatively well.

Brownites are aware the prime minister will look weak if he pulls back now but believe it would be a short-term setback. A key factor, they say, is whether the Brown team would have enough time in a relatively short election campaign to conduct what is described as a search-and-destroy mission on the Tory tax-and-spend plans.

No 10 indicated last night that the government’s comprehensive spending review and pre-budget report will be published on Monday, regardless of whether the election is called.

Advocates of an election were pointing out that the Tories were bound to secure a bounce at the end of the conference season. But the findings caused nerves among some MPs. Derek Wyatt, MP for Sittingbourne and Sheppey - Labour’s third most marginal seat, with a majority of 79 - said: “No one wants it. I think we have to take it on the chin and move on.”

Andrew Dismore, MP for Hendon, said: “It’s a bit like the mobilisation of world war one: once you start, nobody can stop it. Nobody really wanted a war but it happened. I think what we have to say is does anybody really want it? And if not, lets take a deep breath.”

There is comfort for advocates of the election in that much of the Tory recovery appears to come at the expense of the Liberal Democrats, rather than Labour. Support for Labour has fallen only one point since last month’s Guardian/ICM poll, and at 39% is higher than when Tony Blair left office.

Backing for the third party has dropped four points to 16% - a six-year low in the ICM series and a potential crisis for Sir Menzies Campbell whether or not an election is called. Backing for smaller parties has also dropped one point to 7%, substantially lower than it was earlier this year.

That suggests Labour’s core vote has remained solid despite the Conservatives’ high-profile week, which will comfort those around Mr Brown urging him to call an election now.

The question of how the parties would perform in an immediate general election remains finely balanced.

Regional differences and the impact of local campaigning mean that Labour could not be certain to gain an overall majority, although academic estimates suggest that Labour would win 350 seats on today’s figures, an overall majority of around 20. That is much lower than the 66 it achieved in 2005. New boundaries have already reduced this to a notional 48 seats and anything below this level would call into doubt a decision to hold an early general election.

The Conservatives could expect to gain strongly if today’s figures were translated into seats, with one academic estimate suggesting the party would win 244 seats. But any Liberal Democrat recovery during the campaign could eat into Tory support, and boost Labour’s majority.

Mr Cameron exploited Mr Brown’s dilemma by writing to him today asking for the prime minister to allow meetings between opposition parties and senior civil servants to begin immediately.

Such talks are commonplace in the months before the election to prepare civil servants for a change of government. Mr Cameron said Mr Blair had agreed to authorise such meetings from January 2009.

ICM interviewed a random sample of 977 adults aged 18+ by telephone between October 3 and 4 2007.

Interviews were conducted across the country and the results have been weighted to the profile of all adults. ICM is a member of the British Polling Council and abides by its rules.

PARIS: The leak of an official report detailing suspicions of widespread insider trading at EADS - with possible collusion by government officials - triggered paroxysms of recrimination across France on Thursday, even before any formal charges.

The front page of the conservative newspaper Le Figaro described the French market regulators revelations as a “shock wave,” while the business daily La Tribune and the popular Le Parisien tabloid warned that all the ingredients were in place for the scandal to become an “affair of state.”

The dramatic plot line of this unfolding saga, involving the parent of the plane maker Airbus would be gripping enough anywhere, with a cast of characters drawn from the financial and political elite of Europe and with astronomical sums of money involved in developing and selling aircraft and weapons systems. But the as-yet unproved disclosures of suspect share trades while the state shareholder turned a blind eye to an industrial crisis, conform to a view that many French already have: of a national corporate culture that is inherently corrupt and where capitalism serves the interests of a well-connected few at the expense of rank-and-file employees and credulous pensioners.

Airbus is in the midst of a massive restructuring of its European operations that foresees the loss of as many as 10,000 jobs and the sale of as many as seven factories.

“Its easy to understand the outrage of the employees, subjected to tough - but necessary - restructuring, when they contemplate what happened here and there at the helm of the company,” the French newspaper Le Figaro wrote in an editorial Thursday. “The example of EADS will certainly not help to boost the image of business.”

That would be bad news at a time when the new administration of President Nicolas Sarkozy was aiming to pass a number of pro-business measures to stimulate economic growth.

Dominique Reyniй , a professor of political science at the Institut dЙtudes Politiques in Paris, said, “This will revive deep-seated clichйs about the antagonism between the little man struggling to make ends meet and an unscrupulous business class getting rich. In a country like France this can only increase the suspicion people feel towards capitalism.”

Le Figaro, which was shown a copy of the preliminary report by the Financial Markets Authority, reported Wednesday that as many as 21 top managers at European Aeronautic Defense Space and its aircraft subsidiary, Airbus, may have been aware of serious problems with the production of the A380 superjumbo jet when they exercised EADS stock options from November 2005 to March 2006, months before the planes difficulties became public in June 2006.

In its submission to prosecutors, the regulator also included a December 2005 memo addressed to Thierry Breton, then the French finance minister, warning that EADS would soon enter a “zone of turbulence” and advising the government to pare its 15 percent stake, the newspaper said.

Breton has denied wrongdoing and described the states conduct in the matter as “irreproachable.” The current French finance minister, Christine Lagarde, told Parliament Wednesday that a ministry department did recommend in January 2006 that the government cut its EADS stake, but that this advice had been based on the stocks high valuation at the time and “exclusively on financial information available to the public.”

Breton ignored his advisers recommendation, but his failure to sound the alarm about Airbus has led some to accuse him of complicity in the affair.

“The French state is also in the firing line,” the business daily Les Йchos wrote in an editorial. “Once informed of the problems at Airbus, it did not signal an alert, which its responsibilities as a shareholder should have led it to do.”

On Thursday, the president of the finance committee of the Senate, Jean Arthuis, said that he would call a series of public hearings about the EADS case beginning Wednesday. Breton and his former cabinet director, Bruno Bezard, would be among those asked to testify, Arthuis said.

Tales of insider trading at EADS tap into a deep vein of French cynicism about institutionalized corruption of the kind demonstrated most memorably by Captain Louis Renault, the fictional chief of the Casablanca police, who was shocked - shocked! - to find gambling going on inside Ricks Cafй Amйricain, just as he was handed his roulette winnings for the evening.

The French can perhaps be forgiven their sense of dйjа vu. In 1988, a close friend of then-president Franзois Mitterrand and a former prime ministers chief of staff shared inside knowledge of an impending acquisition by the French aluminum maker Pechiney of American Can. The investigation, which dragged on for 11 years, resulted in the first criminal convictions in the country for insider trading.

NEW YORK—MySpace will let U.S. politicians and non-profit groups raise money for their campaigns through its popular social networking site in a service developed with online payments company PayPal.

The tool creates a space for soliciting donations on the MySpace pages of U.S. presidential candidates and non-profit groups, allowing a user to make the contribution from their own PayPal account, or create one quickly. It will be available on MySpace’s Impact Channel highlighting social and political issues at «impact.myspace.com».

The PayPal fund-raising tool allows users to add the feature to their personal MySpace pages and to encourage their friends to support the same causes.

In addition to top contenders for the 2008 White House race, non-profit groups that will use the service include RAINN, the largest U.S. organization fighting sexual assault, and FINCA International, which provides financial services to some of the world’s poorest families.

“It’s one thing for a campaign to go out and reach people directly and raise money, but people respond to issues and causes and pleas far more readily when it comes from people they personally know,” Jeff Berman, MySpace senior vice president of public affairs, told Reuters.

A test version of the Impact Channel was launched in March and since then all of the major presidential candidates have set up dedicated pages on the site.

The Web came into its own as an outlet for communicating political messages in the past few election campaigns. Ahead of the 2008 race, social networks have become the newest tool to reach out to voters.

MySpace, owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp (), offers candidates and charities an audience of nearly 110 million monthly users worldwide, many of them teens and young adults.

“When the biggest presidential candidates on MySpace have larger groups of friends than some of the biggest (music) bands in the world, you know you have reached a landmark,” Berman said.

Democratic hopeful Barack Obama is the leading candidate when it comes to the number of friends on MySpace at more than 180,000, with party rival Hillary Clinton not far behind.

EBay’s PayPal tool allows MySpace users to see how much each of their friends on the social network have donated to the same cause, and lets charities specify their fund-raising goals.

“We’re creating this giant social network money tree,” Dana Stalder, PayPal senior vice president of marketing and product, told Reuters. “You’ll see us do a lot more things around this over the course of the next year.”

Stalder said PayPal was also making the tools available to charities for their own sites.

“FOXNews.com is owned and operated by News Corporation, which also owns and operates MySpace.com.”