ELECTION '05: PRIME Minister Tony Blair has finally announced the general election will be on May 5 and said the country faced a 'fundamental choice' between Labour and the Tories.

His announcement in Downing Street at 11.27 yesterday morning ended weeks of speculation, and triggered the first frantic bout of nationwide campaigning by the party leaders.

The news that had been delayed for 24 hours by the death of Pope John Paul II came on the premier's return from Buckingham Palace, where he asked the Queen to dissolve parliament on Monday.

Mr Blair strode up to the microphones outside No 10 and said: "There will be a general election in Britain on May 5.

"From now until May 5, me and my colleagues will be out every day in every part of Britain talking to the British people about our driving mission for a third term.

"To build on the progress made, to accelerate the changes, to widen still further the opportunities available to the British people and above all else to take that hard-won economic stability, the investment in our public services, and entrench it, make it last for the future and never return to the economic risks and the failing public services of the past.

"So it is a big choice. A fundamental choice. And there is a lot at stake."

Earlier Tory leader Michael Howard told a rally of party supporters in London that voters also faced a choice.

"They can either reward Mr Blair for eight years of broken promises and vote for another five years of talk," he said. "Or they can vote Conservative, to support a party that's taken a stand and is committed to action on the issues that matter to hard-working Britons."

Liberal Democrat leader Charles Kennedy went to Newcastle to start his campaign effort with a pledge to be 'positive and ambitious' for Britain.

"I am not going to spend these next few weeks going around talking Britain down," he said.

"I am going to be addressing people's hopes, not playing on people's fears."

Mr Blair left for Portland immediately after his announcement, choosing Labour's most marginal seat of South Dorset with a majority of 153 over the Tories to kick off his party's campaign. Mr Howard went off to Birmingham and Sale to take his campaign out to the country.

In Birmingham he concentrated on the NHS and his party's plans to invest £34 billion in the health service.

He told his audience of supporters of his campaign on the MRSA hospital superbug: "For me cleaning up our hospitals isn't politics. It's personal.

"Three years ago my mother-in-law died from an infection she picked up in hospital.

"Yes she was frail. Yes she was old. But she still enjoyed life and she need not have died."

In Sale he concentrated on education, again drawing from personal experience, saying: "Education has the power to transform lives. I know, I come from an ordinary family, my parents ran a shop. We didn't have any special privileges.

"But I was lucky enough to live in a town with a first class state school."

He went on: "Fifty years on, I want everyone to have that quality of education."

Mr Kennedy had the most hectic schedule visiting Newcastle, Manchester, Leeds, Edinburgh and Norwich.

His campaign got an early morale boost when Labour's parliamentary candidate for the safe Tory seat of Ribble Valley, local councillor, Stephen Wilkinson, defected to the Lib Dems.

The general election announcement also triggered the traditional horse-trading at Westminster over which Government Bills will reach the statute book. Today the campaign returns to the cockpit of the Commons when Mr Blair faces Mr Howard and Mr Kennedy at the last Prime Minister's Question Time of this parliament.