AMID the carnage, confusion and cacophony of this election, a pattern is at last beginning to emerge: Labour, having largely withstood an early Tory bombardment, is now moving out of the trenches and on to the open battlefield.

Tony Blair’s speech yesterday about immigration and asylum was intended to be seen as that of a bold leader taking the fight to the Conservatives on the one issue on which they have had a sustained opinion poll lead.

But this confidence has been restored only since the return of Gordon Brown to the heart of the Labour campaign. The most successful political partnership in British history has been reunited, the wobbles have been stabilised, the Prime Minister and the Chancellor are once again joined at the hip, by the blip.

The Tories have had their own blip in the polls this week, prompting some of them to question campaign strategy and the emphasis being placed on immigration by Michael Howard.

The tight circle around Mr Howard and Lynton Crosby, the imported Australian campaign director, are insisting that they will not change course at this late stage. “We just have to get our heads down and get on with it,” one Tory said yesterday. A similar message was sent by Mr Crosby in a letter to party candidates stating: “This amounts to a difficult period in the campaign. Understandably, people are tired and it is easy to lose focus.”

Indeed, there are continued rumblings of discontent. A number of senior MPs say that the immgration and asylum issues have undoubtedly strengthened the Tory core vote, but they may have also galvanised other people into backing Labour or the Liberal Democrats. “Just because we have a poll lead on this should not mean it crowds everything else out. I think we may have reinforced our image as the ‘nasty party’,” one Conservative candidate said. Others say that they have not gone far enough and offered bigger and better tax cuts.

The Liberal Democrats have not had anything so exciting as a blip to talk about. Despite their highest poll rating at the start of a campaign and a position as the only main party to have opposed the Iraq war, there is a distinct lack of dynamism in their campaign. Is this sluggishness purely the consequence of a newborn baby keeping Charles Kennedy up at night? Maybe, maybe not.

After 18 days of this campaign and with another dozen to go, the electorate could be forgiven for feeling a little bit bewildered. The parties hardly ever seem to talk about the same issue on the same day; they bombard the million or so key voters with phone calls and leaflets but ignore the rest of us; the radio and television coverage is dominated by journalists interviewing each other with the poor old politicians scarcely getting a look in.

This may explain why party election broadcasts, which traditionally had people running out of living rooms, are getting surprisingly high viewing figures of 12 million or more: there are a lot of people out there trying to make up their minds.

Publicly, Labour insists that it is not talking about what happens if (or when) it wins for the third successive time. Privately, leading party figures are allowing themselves to take a peek over the horizon and survey the post-election landscape being created by the Blair-Brown rapprochement.

The strength of their double-act contrasts with the apparent weakness of Mr Blair on his own. Although a scheme to move Mr Brown out of the Treasury had never been supported by Mr Blair, he had wanted to win a mandate in his own right at this election. The events of the past fortnight now mean that another Labour landslide will be seen as a victory for Mr Brown as much, if not more than, it is for the Prime Minister. The balance of power, or the “tectonic plates” that John Prescott talked about last year, have shifted.

Efforts have begun to ensure a smooth and seamless succession. Friends say that the date on which this takes place depends partly on the result of the election. If the Government secures a Commons majority of fewer than 50, Mr Blair will struggle to survive the year.

His room for manoeuvre increases with the number of Labour MPs.

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