Rise in Perot's support cuts Clinton lead

JUST EIGHT days before the election, a steady growth in support for the independent, Ross Perot, and constant battering on the 'character' issue by a reinvigorated George Bush have combined to reduce significantly Bill Clinton's commanding lead in the battle for the White House.

According to a New York Times/CBS poll yesterday, the Arkansas Governor is now only 5 percentage points ahead of Mr Bush. Others give him a wider margin, of 7, 8 or even 12 points, but all have the same message: 'change' voters who had closed ranks behind Mr Clinton are again flirting with Mr Perot.

The President's standings have hardly budged from the low to middle 30s for almost two months. The fresh ingredient is the new appeal of the Texas billionaire, whose support is put at about

20 per cent.

Mr Perot's surge has not greatly affected the all-important electoral college arithmetic. Mr Clinton's state-by-state leads are such as virtually to guarantee him the 270 votes needed to win. But all that could change if the unprecedented media campaign Mr Perot is mounting pushes him up to the 25 per cent mark or beyond.

Yesterday he made his first orthodox campaign stops since re- entering the race on 21 October, at rallies in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. But the backbone of his effort is a series of hugely expensive prime-time 'info-mercials' on network television, costing pounds 300,000 apiece, which will run nightly until election day.

In the first three weeks of October Mr Perot spent pounds 14m of his own money, exceeding the spending of the Clinton and Bush campaigns combined. He is expected to splash out that much or more in the last 10 days before the vote on 3 November. If nothing else, he has jolted the Democrats out of their complacency.

But it is still Mr Bush who faces the truly uphill task. Yesterday brought further trouble on the Iran-Iraq scandal front, notably allegations in the New Yorker magazine that in 1986, at the height of the Iran-Iraq war, Mr Bush played a role in a secret Reagan administration plan to escalate the war in an attempt to free US hostages in Tehran. Quoting a classified memo, the magazine says Mr Bush, then Vice-President, asked Jordan and Egypt to urge Saddam Hussein to bomb deep inside Iran. It was hoped that Iran would then turn to the US for arms.

Simultaneously, the Bush campaign was fending off new 'dirty tricks' charges from Mr Perot, who claimed last night that he first withdrew from the contest last July after learning the Republicans planned to circulate doctored photographs of his daughter Caroline, and to wiretap his Dallas office telephone lines.

The charges were 'absolutely untrue', the Bush campaign chairman, Robert Teeter, angrily declared. The accusations could backfire against Mr Perot, reviving an impression of paranoia.