MAKING (IF NECESSARY FAKING) A PRIME MINISTER

From this week's poll-induced wobble, back to Mr Blair's determination to beat Mr Brown, Anne McElvoy traces a long march on No. 10 YOUNG campaign workers in Labour's election headquarters in Milbank by the Thames — and young is what nearly all of them are — had been instructed in the art of not panicking when bad news hit. 'Pan- icking makes us seem like losers,' Peter Mandelson had told them.

But they are all addicted to the polls. This week's ICM poll in the Guardian, showing Labour's lead down from 14 points to five, provoked the kind of panic which no amount of Mandelsonian instruction could have prevented. By the morning the poll finally came out, Labour had composed itself and come up with the line. The poll was a 'rogue'. Later in the week, Millbank drew comfort from polling which was less roguish.

Calm was established in the end. But the case of the Guardian ICM poll offered an insight into the fear at the heart of the Labour campaign: the election is Labour's to lose. Still, Labour did its best to stick to the plan. At around eight o'clock most mornings throughout the campaign, Tony Blair arrives in Millbank Tower, having dropped his eldest son Euan off en route at the Tube which will speed him to the grant- maintained Oratory school, far away from Islington's educational dead-zone He passes through the open-plan office, carefully greets the increasingly whey-faced young campaign workers behind their desks and ascends one floor to his office, where his long-time assistant Anji Hunter tries to persuade him to eat something. She has noticed that he has been forgetting to do so. On the road, he starts meals but rarely finishes them. A couple of weeks ago, he looked tense and zombified with exhaustion while the Prime Minister's facial muscles were relaxed, his body lan- guage natural.

Miss Hunter urged him to get an hour's extra sleep a night, to discourage late tele- phone calls and take more vitamins. It seems to have worked; Mr Blair looks bet- ter. It is important that he does. His rela- tive youth and vitality are characteristics which, according to the party's 'focus groups', lure floating voters towards him. So for electoral as well as health reasons, the candidate must be kept in good condi- tion. His first meeting of the day in Millbank — whether he is staying in London or boarding his battle bus for far-flung parts in pursuit of those floating voters — is with his shadow Chancellor Gordon Brown, deputy leader John Prescott, campaign manager Peter Mandelson and press spokesman Alastair Campbell. They are sometimes, though not always, joined by the party's foreign affairs spokesman, Robin Cook. Mr Cook likes to preserve a slight distance from the Blair campaign. Mr Blair likes that way too.

The inner team lists which targets Labour has been hit- ting and which it has missed in the campaign. Again and again, the talk is of 'the mes- sage'. Is it getting through? If it isn't, what's stopping it? The message is Labour's electabii- ty. That sounds like a state- ment of the obvious in an election campaign. But Mr Blair has always known how difficult it will be for Labour to win power.

He has spent the four years since he became leader saying what the party has to do to win next week and what it must avoid. Herein lies the key difference with the Kin- nock campaign. Mr Kinnock believed that if he moved the party away from the margins of the Left and presented socialist policies in the language of moder- ation, rather than of hatred and envy, he could win. Mr Blair thought nothing of the sort. He realised that people were pre- pared to vote Labour only if they felt that the outcome of this act would be the near- est thing imaginable to a Conservative gov- ernment. 'Most people who consider themselves close to Tony had no idea of what they were in for when he became leader,' an aide explained. 'He never laid out all the changes he would make. He worked by surprising the party.'

Here was the first plank of the campaign: Mr Blair would not allow the word 'social- ism' to cross his lips. He has taken to putting the word 'centre' in front of 'Left'. At a rally in North London last week, the `warm-up artists' — all actors, funnily enough — spoke eloquently of their com- mitment to socialism and redistribution. Mr Blair looked on good-naturedly, then took the platform to say something entirely different. No one in the audience seemed to notice. No candidate is allowed to stum- ble in to the day's campaigning unarmed with the 'LIT' (line to take) on the issues of the day, some pithy responses to Tory criticisms, and 'clarifications' (these are underlined) of any party utterances which may have been 'misunderstood'. Before dawn a central computer system dispatches these by fax or computer e-mails to all can- didates. The briefings also contain advice on rhetorical tricks. If you have wondered, for instance, why no New Labour candidate can get through an interview without promising to create a Britain for 'the many, not the few', it is because this formulation has been well-received in focus groups and is thus considered a safe way of expressing Old Labour redistributive instincts without making explicit commitments about how these would be expressed in policy — or higher taxes.

This week, in the wake of Jacques San- ter's 'merchants of doom' intervention in the European debate, candidates were urged to drop the previous Blairite tenet of not being marginalised in Europe and to use more combative language. 'Stress that Labour would fight for our interests; that we are interested in Britain first of all,' read one such briefing.

Throughout the day, the senior figures who are on the road are kept in constant touch with ground-control. Bleeper mes- sage is the preferred method. Messages must be deleted once they have served their purpose. That is to avoid another leak like that of the message from a Blair aide to the leader as he was about to appear on television which read, 'Do something about the hair.'

These mornings in Millbank, and days on the road, are for Mr Blair the last steps of a journey he began years ago. If on 2 May he arrives on the steps of Downing Street, it will be because that is what he wanted above all else, to be Prime Minister. 'Most ambitious Labour politicians have aspired to lead the party,' says a friend. 'That meant very little to Tony. It meant every- thing to him to become Prime Minister.'

A myth spun into profile-writers' fact is that Mr Blair only decided to challenge Gordon Brown for the leadership after John Smith's unexpected death in 1994. In fact he had always intended to fight Brown and believed that Smith was unlikely to win a general election and would have to stand down, at the latest by 1997. Mr Blair had worked out much earlier that he needed to attract support outside Westminster. He began wooing the press when he was shad- ow trade and industry employment spokesman in 1987. He broke the unwrit- ten post-Wapping dispute rule that Labour should give Rupert Murdoch's News Inter- national a wide berth by writing quite regu- lar columns for the Times until they were considered by the paper to be too dull to be continued. 'He was entirely pragmatic about his contacts even then,' says one of his entourage from this time. 'Whereas John [Smith] and Neil [Kinnock] thought that they had to spend time buttering up union leaders, Tony's view was: "Why should I spend time with Bill Morris [the Transport and General Workers boss] who won't support me in the long run when I could be lunching with leader writers and newspaper editors who might?" ' Nowadays, it is Alastair Campbell, how- ever, who decides the details of press rela- tions, drawing on his knowledge of Grub Street enmities and friendships. As the election campaign began, he told me brusquely that he had 'completely written off' the Daily Telegraph, for which I had been seeking an interview with Mr Blair. `Nothing personal — just your hard luck.' It seemed odd to me that a party which needs the support of a lot of former Tory voters should not be keen to show off its leader in all his glory to the Telegraph. `We'll get to them somehow,' Mr Campbell explained.

Like all natural members of elites, Mr Blair is adept at farming out less agreeable tasks to others, and the irreverent Mr Campbell punctures the pieties of New Labour rather effectively. When the Labour leader went to Germany to address industrialists, his press secretary stomped round the Hamburg press room shouting at Tory-supporting journalists triumphantly, `We're live on Kraut TV — beat that!'

I once sat with Mr Blair discussing Labour's European policy. He affected to be rather interested in a supper club of centre-Left Eurosceptics I had just helped found. Mr Campbell hove into view. `You're not banging on about Europe again, are you?' And to Mr Blair, com- mandingly: 'God, she's a bore on this. Change the subject.' `I used to think that he was modelling himself on Sir Bernard Ingham [Lady Thatcher's rebarbative spokesman],' says a Conservative press officer. 'But he's already going much further than Bernard 0/i, all right, one more fair), story.' would ever have dared. It will be interest- ing to see if he controls himself in No. 10.'

Another group to receive the attentions of the Blair team were disaffected Tory thinkers and journalists. New Labour has cultivated Conservative columnists such as Simon Heifer of the Daily Mail, whose right-wing attacks on John Major they saw as a force destabilising the government with Daily Mail readers.

Drinks or a meeting with the Labour leader have always been doled out as treats or rewards. When Mr Hafer wrote a col- umn during the Labour party conference praising Mr Blair's performance, Mr Man- delson, reading a faxed copy of the paper's early edition, was heard to remark happily, `That's worth a couple of White Ladies.' Mr Heifer was duly invited to Mr Blair's suite for a thank-you potion the next day.

New Labour then set out to conquer London's elites, or at least people who think of themselves thus. With the help of Mr Mandelson, Mr Blair made sure that no potentially sympathetic people of any influ- ence were left unloved. Disregarding the usual tribal rules of association, he often displayed the same courtesy and enthusi- asm towards traditional Conservatives as he did towards his own party. 'I find Blair so much easier to get along with than Major,' said one Tory newspaper editor. 'I suppose it's a class thing. He's more like us, isn't he?'

The trick in handling elites, which he grasped instinctively, probably because he has always lived among them, is to realise that they desire more than anything else to be taken seriously. He has assiduously cul- tivated the impression that he listens intently to what other people have to say. When Simon Jenkins, the (broadly Conser- vative) journalist, wrote his broadside against the centralising of power in Britain, he found himself ignored by the Tories but taken seriously by Mr Blair, who proceeded to suggest in a speech that Mr Jenkins would himself make a good mayor for Lon- don.

After a while you sense, in these endless consultations and 'I-hear-what-you're-say- ing' sessions, that very little of the sub- stance of these discussions ever surfaces again in his mind. The conversations are strokings rather than soundings.

As far as his own party is concerned, one senses that the enthusiasm for Mr Blair will wane if he wins the election and fails, in terms of the expectations of many natural Labour voters, to deliver the kind of poli- cies they hold to be just and right. So far, Mr Blair has dealt with doubters by claim- ing that New Labour is a return to the real core values of the party and that those who disapprove are out of step with its natural development. But a party of the Left which thinks on the Right may well be a difficult one to hold together in office. 'I'm getting a bit fed up with being New Labour,' admitted one activist. 'I feel like going back to being just labour.'