It's a tough campaign but Blair still looks likely to win tomorrow's election, writes Frank Millar
Can it ever again be glad confident morning for Tony Blair? His 1997 landslide was achieved to the accompaniment of D:Ream's promise that Things Can Only Get Better. Yet, even as they anticipate the return of the Labour government, his detractors inside the party are hoping things can only get worse for the man whose predicted third triumph might yet see him exceed Margaret Thatcher's tenure in 10 Downing Street.
We do not now have long to wait. The British people go to the polls tomorrow. And by the early hours of Friday we should see emerging the result which always looked certain. For, as has been widely remarked, election results usually look to have been entirely predictable in retrospect.
Yet the urgency of Blair's final sweep through the Labour marginals - coupled with the severity of his assault on the Liberal Democrats - has persuaded many commentators that there is real fear now in Labour's high command that the Iraq war and the generalised question of trust could see Labour's Commons majority cut in half.
Delving below the headline figures of the most recent polls, it is possible to find in the detail support for Charles Kennedy's contrary view that Labour is simply "scaremongering" to bring out the Labour vote.
ICM's poll for yesterday's Guardian newspaper did appear to bolster Labour's claim to be most at risk in the battleground seats, with its support in Tory-challenged marginals down from 47 per cent in 2001 to 41 per cent now. However, this is a better margin, by three points, than when Labour first raised the alarm a week ago.
One of the inquests to come after the results are declared may be into how the pollsters got it wrong, at least in terms of the disparities in their estimates of Labour's strength. That said, it was interesting to note that yesterday's Times/ITV tracker poll showed Labour overall with 41 per cent and the Tories unchanged on 29 per cent, while Mori in the Financial Times gave Labour a 10-point lead and showed the Conservatives slipping back to the same 29 per cent. If replicated on Thursday (on a uniform swing, which cannot be presumed) Blair would be returned to power with a majority in the region of 140.
The tracker also suggested that, while the continuing controversy over the war has led to Labour defections among professionals and managers, it has had no adverse effect on working-class voters.
While the war of words between Blair and Kennedy grew ever more bitter, the astute commentator Peter Riddell also joined the growing list of experts dismissing Labour's claim that if one in 10 Labour voters defect or do not vote then the Conservatives get in "by the back door" as "claptrap".
Polling expert Prof John Curtice of the University of Strathclyde argues it would take one in four Labour voters to defect or abstain to deny Blair his overall majority. And even that could see Michael Howard lagging a hundred or so seats behind Labour in the search for partners with whom to form a government.
Against all this, Labour can cite the evidence advanced by Mori chairman Bob Worcester after finding that some 36 per cent of people say they could still change their minds on how to vote. Sir Bob told the BBC this suggested a higher level of voter volatility than in any election in the past 20 years, with many people clearly not yet happy with their decision.
Nor can Blair be happy to find the war, and ongoing events in Iraq, haunting him all the way to the polling stations. Clearly frustrated and depressed at continued questioning of his character, Blair concluded a stormy session of ITV's Ask the Leader series late on Monday night by saying he was no longer going to beg people to believe he had acted over Iraq in good faith.
Asked by Jonathan Dimbleby if he really wanted the votes of people who didn't trust him, the Labour leader replied: "In this campaign there's been some pretty fearsome attacks on my character. I'm not going to stand here and beg for my own character - people can make up their minds whether they trust me or not."
This outburst should not be confused with the so-called "masochism strategy" (talked-up and then abandoned earlier in the campaign when things appeared to be going well) in which Blair was to persuade people to love him again by taking all the abuse they could throw.
Plainly fed up at finding his campaign continuously derailed, he sounded authentic when he announced: "I have given up trying to persuade people over this. I do not care if people criticise me, but I did it honestly."
This episode may also provide further reason to think Labour is genuinely fearful about the scale of possible defections or abstentions. For Blair and his campaign managers can hardly be unaware of the downside to this late focus on the Liberal Democrats - every time they attack Lib Dem leader Kennedy they remind people about the war.
And while the evidence suggests the war itself does not rate high in the voters' list of concerns, Blair is painfully aware that it feeds that nagging doubt about "trust". Knowing that, some commentators yesterday thought they detected an effort to lower the temperature of Labour's attacks on the Lib Dems. But to little effect, as it happened.
News bulletins throughout yesterday carried the widowed Ann Toward's heartfelt and bitter charge that Blair was to blame for the death of her husband, Guardsman John Wakefield, in a roadside bomb attack in Iraq on Monday.
Kennedy and Howard wisely declined to echo this charge of personal culpability, although the Conservative leader did repeat his charge that there had been insufficient planning for the post-conflict situation in Iraq.
This is galling for Blair and may be why, in the end, he will benefit from characterising this as ultimately a question of leadership.
Whatever the final outcome tomorrow, Howard can be credited with restoring discipline and a thirst for power to a twice defeated and badly demoralised Conservative Party. Yet many even in his own party agree that, at the height of this election battle over Iraq, Howard has not shown himself to be a leader, or a prime minister, in waiting.
Despite the inevitable charge of "opportunism", it was entirely valid for Howard to say that, had he known then what he knows now, he would not have supported the Commons motion approving war on the basis of alleged Iraqi stockpiles of WMD.
The Conservative leader was here tapping into the widely held view that Blair stretched and exaggerated patchy intelligence to make the case for a conflict for which he had given President Bush his prior commitment.
Last weekend's leak of a pre-war planning meeting further reinforced the suspicion that Blair kept the country in the dark about both his intention and his purpose.
However, Howard's unwise attempt to join the Lib Dem bandwagon and exploit the attorney general's alleged (and unproven) change of heart about the war's legality raised serious questions about his leadership capacity.
For Howard chose to have it both ways, suggesting he would have confided the AG's doubts about the legality to the cabinet, Commons and country yet would still have gone to war to effect "regime change".
Thus condemning Blair for ignoring Lord Goldsmith's warning (as he chose to interpret it) that the war was illegal, Howard said he would have prosecuted it in the cause of the one thing, regime change, which Lord Goldsmith made clear would (from London's perspective) be in breach of international law.
It is not difficult to understand Blair's disdain, or his irritation at the suggestion that Howard the supreme Atlanticist - or any other British prime minister for that matter - would have chosen to let America go it alone. When Sir David Frost put that option to him last Sunday, Blair appeared to wince before saying that did not fit his perception of the British people.
If the polls are broadly correct it also seems the voting public do not perceive the Conservative policy prospectus - and especially on the economy - as a serious programme for government. Hence, perhaps, Howard's repeated invitation to the voters to "send Mr Blair a message".
That many are minded to is not in doubt. But the question mark over their numbers brings us at the conclusion of the campaign to the question with which we began. Will Blair's majority be big enough to enable him to rule for a full third term? Or will the electorate deliver a bloody nose and hasten the day of the Gordon Brown succession?
Prudent analysts are disregarding the wider poll margins and suggesting Labour's majority could be reduced to between 60 and 80 seats. For all his public nervousness, however, I fancy Blair privately thinks he can still reach the magical 100 mark.