Tony Blair won a third term

British Prime Minister Tony Blair's Labour party won an historic third term in office with a majority in the House of Commons, official results showed.

With 543 of the 646 seats counted, Labour had won 326 -- enough to form a government. Counting will continue through the night and a winner will be officially confirmed Friday morning.

Conservative opposition leader &to=http:// english.pravda.ru/main/2001/11/01/19888_.html ' target=_blank>Michael Howard has offered Blair his congratulations.

Winning a third term is a triumph for Blair, whose campaign for re-election was dominated by a furious debate about his credibility in the wake of the divisive Iraq war.

Breathing new life into Britain's Labour party after almost two decades of &to=http:// english.pravda.ru/world/20/91/368/15045_urugway.html ' target=_blank>Conservative rule, Blair won landslide election victories in 1997 and again in 2001, tells CTV News.

The reduced majority could make it more difficult for Mr. Blair to push through legislative reforms in Parliament if rebels within his own party chose to challenge them. He campaigned on Labor's economic record and the investment it has made in health and education. But he has said he wants to make further changes in his third term, seeking an enduring legacy from an era in which he dominated the political landscape with a vast expansion of public services and a pugnacious foreign policy, sending troops to the Balkans, Sierra Leone, Afghanistan and Iraq.