LONDON: Britain’s opposition Labour Party has taken a four-point lead over Prime Minister David Cameron’s Conservatives after the first TV encounter of an unusually close-fought national election, an opinion poll showed on Sunday.

The poll is a morale boost for Labour and its leader Ed Miliband, and prompted party strategists to say it showed they could win an outright majority on May 7.

Miliband’s earnest personality is mocked by the country’s mainly right-leaning press, and the left-wing party hopes voters will see past caricatures and warm to him during the campaign.

“As the polls this morning indicate, this is a winnable election for Labour,” Douglas Alexander, Labour’s campaign chairman, told the BBC’s Andrew Marr Show.

“It is difficult, but it is certainly doable that we can get a majority,” he added, saying he was confident Labour could increase its support in the coming weeks.

Britain’s future in the European Union could ride on the outcome as Cameron is pledging an EU membership referendum.

The poll, by YouGov for the Sunday Times, put Labour on 36 percent, the Conservatives on 32 percent, the centrist Liberal Democrats, now in coalition with Cameron’s Conservatives, on 8 percent, the anti-EU UK Independence Party (UKIP) on 13 percent, and the Greens on 6 percent.

It also suggested, contrary to an earlier poll, that most Britons — by a margin of 49 percent to 34 percent — thought Miliband had performed better than Cameron in last Thursday’s first TV encounter of the campaign.