NEW Labour has always loved using military language to describe its activities, so it is no surprise to discover that there is a “war desk” in the party’s campaign headquarters, alongside the “attack” and “field operations” units.

But until the last fortnight, the election had the feel of a phoney war: Labour drifted into an early Conservative bombardment, taking successive hits while never working out how to shoot back.

Although the party’s slogan is “Foward not Back”, sometimes the guns appear to be pointed sideways, or even at its feet. There was a bitter row over Labour’s negative poster attacks on Mr Howard, which were certainly crass and ill-thought out, if not intentionally anti-Semitic.

Tony Blair’s glitzy unveiling of his election pledge card achieved little impact with voters, while publication of the party’s “mini-manifestos” were overshadowed by aggressively populist Tory launches.

Meanwhile the Prime Minster was becoming demoralised as he trailed around television studios to meet real voters, only to find himself invariably shouted at by angry women.

But Labour at least found its way on to the battlefield by taking advantage of the disclosure in The Times of Howard Flight’s secretly recorded admission of a hidden Tory spending cuts agenda.

For all the subsequent efforts to vaporise him, the former Conservative deputy chairman’s bombshell has blown a gaping hole in the credibility of his party’s campaign and galvanised that of Labour.

“Flight gave us lift-off,” said a senior party source. “The whole atmosphere changed and everything is now gelling together.”

It is tempting to extend the phoney war metaphor and suggest that Labour, like Britain in 1939-40, had used the pre-election period to re-arm, work out a battle plan and shake the rust from its fighting forces.

Notwithstanding this week’s opinion polls showing the Tories are closing the gap with Labour, the party believes that the Conservatives are still losing ground on key vote-turning territories such as the economy and the health service.

Although the internal dysfunctions and nagging doubts within the Labour campaign have not been entirely dissipated by the events of the past few days, its leading figures are congratulating themselves for having “toughed out” their early wobbles. They still expect to lose seats, but the prospect of governing with a possibly unsustainable parliamentary majority of less than 50 is receding. A good result is probably a margin of 80 or more, even though this would effectively halve Mr Blair’s majority at the last election.

Labour’s headquarters on Victoria Street, five minutes’ walk from the Houses of Parliament, is a pretty nondescript place. Essentially it is a horseshoe-shaped open-plan office, hastily leased last year because the party’s £5 million permanent base in nearby Old Queen Street was judged to be utterly unsuitable for modern political campaigns.

Much of the space is still unoccupied, awaiting the arrival of Downing Street and ministerial advisers when the election officially gets under way next month. In recent weeks such emptiness may have exacerbated the sense of anguished isolation which characterised the campaign’s relationship with the outside world.

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