THE Prime Minister's North-East constituents clearly do not think that now is the right time to bomb or attack Iraq.

The Northern Echo's poll shows that only 17.6 per cent of people in Tony Blair's Sedgefield, County Durham, constituency feel he would be right to support an attack on Saddam Hussein by the US.

Indeed, such is the depth of feeling against war - 64.6 per cent against - that it may prove difficult for any attack to gain wide-scale popular support in the foreseeable future.

No one we contacted in the past week had a good, or sympathetic, word to say about Saddam.

But time and again, our pollsters were told that people wanted real evidence that he possesses weapons of mass destruction before they were prepared to think about supporting a war.

There was concern that Mr Blair is clinging too tightly to US President George Bush's coat-tails, and that diplomacy and the UN weapons inspectors had not been given enough time.

There was a deep worry that innocent civilians in Iraq would be the ones to suffer most from an attack, and there was also a fear about the knock-on effect that a war would have on a notoriously unstable region of the world.

A number of people suggested that Mr Blair was concentrating too much on the world stage and not enough on the problems of the public services closer to home. The main argument from the "yes" camp was that there was unfinished business with Saddam following the Gulf War, and that the time was right to complete it.

The Northern Echo's poll was of 887 constituents chosen at random and interviewed over the phone.

While we do not make any scientific claims for the poll, it does provide a fascinating snapshot of opinion at the moment among the electorate of 64,925 in Sedgefield.

In the past, our polls have proved surprisingly accurate in predicting the outcome of the General Election - we were spot on in three out of four constituencies surveyed - and of the size of Ray Mallon's landslide in the Middlesbrough mayoral race.

Last year, we conducted a similar poll in Sedgefield which showed that 50.7 per cent of people thought Mr Blair would be wrong to press ahead with a General Election on May 3, with foot- and-mouth rife in the countryside. Soon afterwards, Mr Blair delayed polling day for a month.

The figures in today's poll from the villages across Mr Blair's constituency are quite consistent.

The Trimdons, Fishburn and Bishopton are the places where an attack has the greatest support, but Sedgefield itself - where the Prime Minister is not as popular as elsewhere in the constituency which bears its name - was vehemently opposed, with only six per cent supporting the bombing.

However, there was some understanding of the difficulty of Mr Blair's position. "If I were in his shoes, I wouldn't know what to do," said one respondent in Bishopton.