The only major party leader in Britain to oppose the Iraq war vowed on Monday to keep the issue high in voters' minds as Prime Minister Tony Blair heads towards a national election.
If Blair had hoped voters would forget the deeply unpopular Iraq war, he should think again, says the leader of the opposition Liberal Democrats.
"I don't see the Iraq issue going away in the run-up to the election - and we are going to contribute to that," said Charles Kennedy.
"It has become totemic of other issues and a general lack of trust in the prime minister and government, and that will stay in people's minds," Kennedy told Reuters.
Controversy over the war has knocked Blair's popularity both within his own left-leaning Labour Party and with voters, although pollsters still expect him to win the election expected next year.
The resurgent Liberal Democrats, Britain's third-largest party, have made electoral gains from opposing the war and have stolen the limelight from the Conservatives, the second-biggest party, which backed the war.
"If we hadn't been there, the debate on Iraq would not have engaged in the way that it did - we moulded the debate," argues Kennedy, a 44-year-old Scot who became party leader in 1999.
In June local elections, a public backlash over Iraq helped the Liberal Democrats beat the ruling party for the first time ever. The centrist party aims to capitalise on that and gain a quarter of the national vote in the next general election, now possibly just eight months away.
Opinion polls show them taking around 21 percent of the national vote, the best showing since the party was founded in 1988, and up from about 18 percent in the 2001 election.
"If we maintain our current progress, we will increase our share of the national vote and seats and there is no knowing how well we might do," said Kennedy.
A strategy of targeting both Labour and Conservative seats, however, could be doomed to failure, say analysts, and ambitions for government are premature.
Britain's electoral system, which favours the two main parties, makes it hard for small parties to convert votes into parliamentary seats. After the 2001 election, the Liberal Democrats took only 52 of Parliament's 659 seats.
Analysts say they would need a 10 percent swing even to become the main opposition party at the next election and that getting into government will take more than a decade.
As parliamentarians return to Westminster after the summer break and gear up for the election, Kennedy says he thinks hospitals and schools will top the domestic agenda.
"I think public services will dominate the debate and the question of whether the funding has got through and had any tangible results."
Critics say Labour's heavy investment in overburdened hospitals, has come too late. Under Kennedy, the Liberal Democrats will campaign for higher taxes on the wealthy and for the abolition of fees for higher education.