The Times (London)

By Frankie Edozien

A CAR driven by Sir Henry Royce is expected to fetch up to Pounds 90,000 at auction later this month after being discovered in a country shed where it had been stored for 56 years.

Rolls-Royce enthusiasts consider the find to be particularly exciting because the car was used regularly by Royce, who started the company with Charles Stewart Rolls in 1906.

“It is undoubtedly the most significant Rolls-Royce to be offered for sale for at least 25 years,” said Stewart Skillbeck, Rolls-Royce specialist at the classic car auctioneers Bonhams and Brooks. It is to be auctioned on June 30 at Towcester racecourse.

The car, commissioned in 1923, is fitted with bodywork by the coachbuilders Hooper and was a development model that Royce used for five years as his main mode of transport from his home in Sussex.

The New York Post

By FRANKIE EDOZIEN Post Correspondent

LONDON - Prime Minister Tony Blair’s Labor Party was re-elected in a landslide yesterday, winning a second term at the helm of Britain’s government.

Exit polls said Blair’s party would win a 195-seat majority in the 659-seat House of Commons. It was the first time in 100 years that a Labor prime minister had won re-election.

Blair, jubilant, said he was looking forward to implementing his party’s platform.

“The expectation vested in us is the challenge that I relish - a lot done, a lot left to do,” said Blair, 48.

For weeks, polls gave Labor a double-digit lead over the Conservatives and their leader, William Hague.

Conservatives made the economy an issue, railing against the prospect that Blair will seek closer ties with the European Union and switch Britain’s currency from the pound to the euro.

But pollsters said voters believe Labor is doing a good job with the economy. Blair also promised to boost health-care and public services.

In a last-ditch effort to quell the landslide, Hague’s party, often called the Tories, put up billboards depicting Blair grinning cheekily in a bubble with a needle next to it. “Burst his Bubble,” the ads read.

Labor countered by playing on anti-Margaret Thatcher sentiments with billboards showing the “Iron Lady” with a dour expression, and the line: “Be afraid. Be very afraid.”

Blair said repeatedly that Thatcher “would be pulling the strings” if the Tories won.

The Tories suffered a major setback days before the election when the conservative Times of London backed Blair and Labor for the first time.

Other right-leaning newspapers followed suit, leaving Hague with only one major newspaper endorsement.

Labor officials, worried about a low turnout by voters who saw a Blair victory as a foregone conclusion, waged a last-minute get-out-the-vote push.

Still, turnout was only 60 percent, down from 70 percent in 1997.

Britain’s third party, the Liberal Democrats, mounted a media blitz in a bid to capture more than the 46 seats it won in 1997.

Hague called the election results “deeply disappointing,” amid speculation that he’d step down as the Tories’ leader