An embattled Mr William Hague yesterday insisted that reports of a crisis of confidence in his campaign high command were "complete fiction".
But with just 17 days to go, two new opinion polls showed the Conservatives still "flatlining" towards a heavy defeat on June 7th.
The two NOP polls gave Labour a commanding lead of 19 points - the same margin as at the same point in the 1997 election - and enough to give Mr Tony Blair an increased 237-seat majority in the new House of Commons.
In an exercise calculated to increase the sense of doom surrounding Mr Hague's campaign, Labour released the results of the party's latest private polling, suggesting an even greater lead of 22 points.
As if all that wasn't enough, former Tory prime minister Sir Edward Heath declared that his party needed a second defeat to force it back to the political centre ground. The Conservatives, he said, could now face a decade or more in the political wilderness.
The Prime Minister abandoned the election trail yesterday for a family celebration of his baby son, Leo's, first birthday.
But there was no respite for Mr Hague as he dismissed the Sunday Telegraph's report of a bitter rift between the party hierarchy and its advertising agency over the decision to target "core" Tory supporters rather than floating voters.
The party's advertising and polling chiefs were said to have opposed the decision by Mr Hague's strategy group to focus on one issue - the euro - in the final week of the campaign. And the rift reportedly triggered a warning by senior Conservative figures of a possible "meltdown" on June 7th unless the party's ratings rapidly improve.
Later editions of the newspaper carried denials of the story by key personnel involved. Mr Hague meanwhile moved to pre-empt any damaging outbreak of public panic among Conservative candidates - asserting that everyone involved was "very happy" with the campaign approach and he believed that the Conservatives could still win.
"We can win. We are certainly winning the campaign. Millions of people in this country are undecided about how to vote," he told the BBC. "It is one of the strong messages coming back that millions of people are fed up with Labour, feel let down by Labour."
During a radio phone-in on IRN Mr Hague later renewed his challenge to the Labour leader to take part in a televised debate. But Mr Blair will be throwing Mr Hague no lifelines as he prepares to shift the campaign focus on to Labour's commitment to improve the public services.
In a precursor to Mr Blair's big speech on the subject tomorrow Mr Peter Mandelson put himself centre-stage again yesterday, conceding that public services were failing to give people what they deserved and declaring it time for "deeprooted" reforms in health and education.
With the Tories still to recover their reputation for economic competence, 49 per cent of those interviewed by NOP said they would trust Labour to make their families better off, as opposed to just 23 per cent who said they would trust the Conservatives.
But as public sector unions signalled bitter battles ahead over Labour's second-term plans for increasing involvement of the private sector in the health service, there were warnings too for Mr Blair, with only 22 per cent of voters thinking the NHS had improved under Labour, against 30 per cent who believed it had deteriorated and 36 per cent who thought it the same as under the Tories.
By a margin of three to one, voters also concluded that the Blair government had been soft on crime.