Labour is persisting with a high-risk strategy of class warfare in Crewe & Nantwich in a desperate attempt to avoid losing the by-election and further destabilising Gordon Brown’s troubled leadership.

Labour leaflets distributed over the weekend showed Edward Timpson, the Conservative candidate, standing outside Crewe station with a top hat digitally superimposed on his head. It was later replaced with a second leaflet in which Mr Timpson was silhouetted out amid claims that Labour did not have permission to use the picture of Mr Timpson.

The leaflets come days after a Labour circular showed images of the Conservative candidate’s “mansion” house and a spoof Tory “application form”. The leaflets, which have dismayed some ministers, posed questions such as, “Do you live in a big mansion house?” and, “Do you think regeneration is adding another wing to your mansion?” with large red ticks next to them. The theme is repeated prominently on Labour’s campaign website.

Mr Timpson has also been ambushed by Labour activists in top hats and tails calling themselves the “Tarporley Toffs”, a reference to a genteel Cheshire village associated with country sports near where he lives. His home is 13 miles from Crewe.

Local Labour campaign chiefs say that they are highlighting the “excessively privileged background” of the Tory candidate, who is a barrister and the son of the multimillionaire Timpson shoe-mending family.

Not a single picture of the Prime Minister has featured in any of Labour’s literature. The party says that this is because it is fighting a campaign based on local issues and that Mr Brown’s image will be used at some point. His face does appear on Tory and Liberal Democrat leaflets. Few of the Labour ministers and MPs who have spoken to The Times in recent days, including those that have been active in the Crewe camapign, have supported the class war tactic being deployed in Crewe. Some fear that it will jeopardise the party’s appeal to Middle England.

But Steve McCabe, the Birmingham Labour MP who is running the campaign, told The Timesthat the Conservatives were trying to turn the by-election into a referendum on the Prime Minister, fronted by David Cameron who will again visit today. “They do not want to talk about the local issues. It’s about giving a bloody nose. [Timpson] is someone who is from an excessively privileged back-round who has shown virtually no interest. He is a Johnny-come-lately to assist a Tory national campaign.”

Labour are hoping to contrast this with their candidate, Tamsin Dunwoody, the daughter of the former MP, Gwyneth, who they have billed as a “fighter, who’ll stand up for Crewe and Nantwich”.

The Liberal Democrat and Tory teams, and some Labour MPs, say that national issues, particularly the axed 10p tax band, are regularly being raised on the doorstep.

The first snapshot poll of the campaign put the Tories ahead of Labour by four points. The ICM survey for The Mail on Sunday put the Tories on 43 per cent to Labour’s 39 with the Lib Dems behind on 16 per cent, which would give the Tories a majority of 1,000. It showed that, among Labour voters, more thought that Mr Cameron would make a better Prime Minister than Mr Brown.

Yesterday’s poll suggests that there are still many undecided voters. They include Patricia Baldwin, 57, who lives in a Lib Dem ward and runs a property maintenance company with her husband. She said: “I am very up in the air at the moment. I don’t like how the National Health Service is going or how the poor pensioners are struggling. I am not happy at all. The 10p tax is an absolute disgrace. I am very disillusioned with the country, I think everybody is.”

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