WITH all the major parties' campaigns for next month's local elections launched this week, the wall of voter apathy into which they normally run headlong is less apparent this year since, coupled with the voting for the Scottish and Welsh assemblies the same day and Euro elections five weeks later, Labour faces the biggest mid-term test of approval of any government.

But the results will be far more than those of some mammoth opinion poll on the government's record.

They could also mark a crucial watershed for William Hague's future as Tory leader.

In the Conservative deserts of Scotland and Wales, the Tories are already regarded as third-rate runners behind Labour's nationalist opponents, so it is in the town halls across the country that the relaunched Mr Hague's fate lies.

He must see considerable gains clocked up and control of several key councils wrested by his party back from Labour.

But will he?

And what would constitute a good result?

Tory party chiefs say that a gain of 400 seats would be a success.

Labour claim that fewer than 1,500 Conservative gains would put the skids under Mr Hague's leadership.

Last year, in the council elections, Labour won 38 per cent of the vote, with the Tories six points behind and the Liberal Democrats - whose strength in local government is often overlooked - on 24 per cent.

On that basis, the Conservatives might expect to collect more than 1,000 gains - a triumph by their own modest or nervous target of 400, or a failure according to the benchmark Labour has set them. But a truer measure of any Conservative comeback, will be against the results of four years ago when the 13,000 seats being contested on May 6 were last fought for at the height of the Tory government's unpopularity and when Labour took 47 per cent of the vote and gained 2,000 seats.

The results will show if the Conservatives have recovered from that awful low - and by how much may determine whether William Hague's leadership has stood up to its biggest electoral test so far.

Given that the government's recent opinion poll rating of 54 per cent is twice that of the Tories, that Tony Blair's personal rating is a fantastic 13 per cent higher than his party and that the Kosovo factor may serve Labour as well as the Falklands War did the Tories under Margaret Thatcher, it is indeed a daunting prospect - particularly if the voters treat the polls as a referendum on the government's record nationally, rather than a judgment of local issues such as council tax levels, closures of old folks' homes, what councillors pay themselves and so forth.

If the Tories, who are fighting a record number of seats this time, fail this test of their strategy and stumble, or are split in the Euro elections, it could be curtains for Mr Hague.

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