Britain to hold national election May 6

LONDON -- Britain's first national election in five years will take place May 6, Prime Minister Gordon Brown planned to announce today, launching a monthlong campaign that could end in his ouster and the return of the opposition Conservative Party to power for the first time in 13 years.

After months of anticipation over the election date, Brown will finally play his hand, traveling to Buckingham Palace to ask Queen Elizabeth II for permission to dissolve Parliament and call the first national vote since 2005.

A Labour Party official, who requested anonymity to discuss the announcement in advance, confirmed Brown would announce a May 6 poll today, after a morning meeting of his Cabinet and an audience with the queen.

For Brown, appreciated by some but widely unloved, election day could end a three-year tenure as prime minister marked by the near-collapse of the British economy and beset by division within his party.

Defeat would bring to a close a British political era begun with Tony Blair's landslide 1997 election victory, which returned the Labour Party to office and brought an unprecedented three successive electoral triumphs for the center-left organization. Britain's Conservatives -- the party of Margaret Thatcher and Winston Churchill -- hope to win a national election for the first time since 1992.

Brown, who has never before contested a national election as party leader, planned to almost immediately hit the campaign trail, seeking to woo voters stung by the impact of the financial crisis, weary at the war in Afghanistan and furious at a scandal over lawmakers' inflated and fraudulent expense claims.

The 59-year-old, who succeeded Blair in 2007, said he'll stake his chances on his record in guiding Britain through the global economic meltdown. warning that his rivals' plans for immediate spending cuts to ease crippling national debt threaten to harm, not speed, the country's recovery.

"I have not spent the last two years taking this economy through the worst financial recession to sit back and allow a Conservative Party which has no idea about how to run the economy to put it all at risk," Brown told the Tuesday edition of Britain's Daily Mirror newspaper.