Labour may be deliberately talking up the chances of a Tory surprise to galvanise waverers, writes Frank Millar
Election shock horror: Howard galvanises Tory vote as "Private poll reveals Labour fears." Should we believe it? Or is this classic New Labour spin?
This election campaign is widely regarded as the most controlled, and the most boring, ever. So yesterday's headlines added a welcome frisson as we entered the final week and wondered what on earth Tony Blair, Michael Howard and Charles Kennedy might say and offer that they haven't already declared and promised since the pre-election campaign began many months ago.
Suddenly it seemed there was a real contest. And if you were disinclined to believe it, there was the clinching ingredient - a leaked private report confirming that Labour's lead had shrunk to just 2 per cent in key marginal constituencies.
The report for Labour's high command obtained by the Guardian newspaper confirmed the party's national lead.
However, it also warned this was lagging in the marginals, with Labour candidates just 2 per cent ahead of their Conservative or Liberal Democrat challengers in up to 100 seats.
This leak coincided with a Mori poll in the Financial Times confirming the same story, with the numbers of Conservatives certain to cast a ballot in the marginals sharply up and Blair under growing pressure to counter apathy or disillusion and get his vote out.
The prime minister has been warning Labour voters not to count the election as being in the bag. And last Sunday's leaked Alastair Campbell memo - while declaring Labour almost home and dry on the arguments over policy - did contain the health warning that Labour could still be hurt by low turnout next Thursday.
Mr Blair is right to say that many of the marginal constituencies could turn on a couple of hundred votes or less. It is also worth bearing in mind that - while the Conservatives ended up with a net gain of just one - there was also volatility in the 2001 election when a good many seats changed hands.
So has Mr Blair real cause for concern? Before considering that, look below the surface of yesterday's headlines for a salutary reminder of the uphill struggle facing the Tories. Mori's 10-point lead for Labour nationally would give Mr Blair a Commons majority of 148. And even if Labour's lead plunges as suggested in the marginals, the outcome of this would be "a notional majority of about 80".
Mr Blair would certainly like to get back with a majority again in triple figures. If more cautious commentators prove correct and the majority fell to between 50 and 80, Mr Blair knows this might be taken to confirm that he is in fact a liability and that the outcome would have been worse had Chancellor Gordon Brown not come "to the rescue".
This, of course, is to underline that the real interest of the commentariat is with what authority Mr Blair will be returned to Number 10, and the impact of any significant reduction in Labour's majority on the prospects for a handover to Mr Brown sooner rather than later.
Remember: with just six more campaigning days to go there is still no poll putting Mr Howard in contention for Mr Blair's job.
That said, some experts believe the pollsters could be as wrong this time as they were in 2001 and 1997 in their estimate of Labour's advantage. Moreover Philip Cowley, reader in parliamentary government at the University of Nottingham, argued recently in the New Statesman there was no basis for assuming that the bias which exists in the electoral system would necessarily work its magic for Labour in the same way this time.
Mr Cowley advanced a number of possible reasons for this. First, the post-devolution reduction in the number of Scottish seats hurts Labour disproportionately. The Tories also appear to be targeting the marginals properly. And there was also some evidence that the enthusiasm for pro-Labour, anti-Conservative tactical voting of the last two elections had begun to fade.
Cowley cited one poll showing Labour voters still heavily inclined to vote Lib Dem to stop a Tory.
However, the Lib Dems appeared evenly split between those who would vote Labour to stop a Tory and those who would vote Tory to stop Labour.
The Conservatives would benefit from this, argued Mr Cowley, noting that they are the challengers in 85 per cent of the 79 seats Labour has to lose to forfeit its overall Commons majority.
He went on: "You do not have to be a statistical whizz to work out what will happen in these seats [ if] the anti-Conservative tactical voting of previous elections begins to disappear. As Labour's vote falls, the Conservatives would start to gain the key marginal seats, even without any sizeable increase in their own vote."
On this analysis, the canny Blair is right to be anxious, and to warn his party and its supporters there should be no let-up between now and May 5th. In the matter of Blair's majority, size really does matter.
Which is why so many Westminster journalists yesterday suspected that Labour might have leaked the story itself.
However, in terms of the overall outcome - assuming a uniform swing away from 2001 - Labour could still expect a majority of 50 plus even if they and the Conservatives each claimed an equal 36 per cent of the total vote.
For all the talk of a Lib Dem breakthrough in Labour's heartlands, Blair's party can suffer a substantial stay-at-home factor and still hold on. YouGov's Peter Kellner told The Irish Times there was no reason to assume that a significant fall in turnout (it fell 12 points from 1997 to just 59 per cent in 2001) would differentially affect the parties.
And, of course, the bottom line is that the Tories need many more votes than Labour to win. On a rough rule of thumb, assuming a 60 per cent turnout, Kellner says that hard reality translates into a winning nine million for Labour, with the Conservatives needing two million more.
So yesterday's reports may have tantalised Mr Brown, and put an added spring in the step of Conservative campaigners.
However, whatever the many and varied outcomes in the marginal battlefields, the experts say they cannot see how a national Labour lead can translate into no Labour majority in the next House of Commons. And at this time of writing, there is still no poll pointing to a swing sufficient to take the Tories into the terrain of a hung parliament, let alone into government.