The British Prime Minister Tony Blair tried to draw a line under infighting over the Labour leadership this morning with an appeal to activists to stop worrying about the polls and focus on policy challenges.
Tony Blair
Mr Blair said he was still confident Labour could "remake" itself in time to win the next General Election and called for an end to personal attacks "by anybody on anyone".
He urged the party to face out, not in, and to remember that "what matters is the people of the country, not ourselves".
But his hopes to halt the civil war convulsing the party seemed set to be dashed, as former Home Secretary Charles Clarke launched a vitriolic personal attack on the man most likely to succeed him as Prime Minister, Gordon Brown.
Speaking at a conference of Blairite thinktank Progress in central London, Mr Blair said that the events of the past week had been "irredeemably old-fashioned", harking back to the bad days of the 1980s.
"That's not the way to do it," he said. But he added: "The good news is that we are three years away from an election and we can remake ourselves. But we can only do it, not by behaving like we did last week, but by behaving like we did when we were hungry for power before 1997, when we understood that what matters is the people of the country, not ourselves.
"We are not going to win if we have personal attacks by anybody on anyone, because it turns the public off and makes them think we are interested again in ourselves and not in them. But we can win if we focus on ideas and policy and if we face out and not face in."
He rejected the impression that Labour was divided - reflected in a poll today that showed voters feel they are more deeply split that the Tories under John Major. "The reason I remain, despite it all, confident, is because in policy and ideas we are strong," he said.
"We are actually ideologically united. The Tories are weak and they are in fact ideologically divided. So there's no reason why if we behave sensibly we can't, even after what's happened, put it behind us and move on, and we should."
In a conciliatory move, Mr Blair stressed the Chancellor's role in creating New Labour alongside him. "New Labour was the product of myself and Gordon sitting down over a long period of time and working out not just the ideas and policy but the structure in which a modern Labour Party could govern," he said.