Mr Tony Blair yesterday launched a "crusade" to put schools and hospitals first, but he was immediately criticised by doctors' and teachers' leaders over Labour's record on public services.
And in a day when Labour angrily denied Conservative claims that it would introduce means testing for child benefit or that the party had "lost the plot" over public services, the Liberal Democrats accused both parties of fighting a "cynical" election campaign.
The Prime Minister was hit on two fronts over public services when the consultants' group within the British Medical Association (BMA) and the National Association of Head Teachers (NAHT) said Labour had failed to address fundamental problems within education and the health service, despite four years in power.
The pressure to "rush through patient numbers, to hit politically inspired targets, to provide politicians with sound-bite headlines with targets reached", was the defining feature of Labour's health policy, the leader of the association's consultants' group, Dr Peter Hawker, told the BMA annual conference. "If we ask ourselves, would we be satisfied for our families to receive the care that we are often forced to provide, we would have to answer `no'."
And the general secretary of the NAHT, Mr David Hart, who says Britain's schools need 40,000 teachers, 30,000 more than Labour has promised to recruit, joined in the attack, warning that a failure to deliver on education reform would be "a betrayal of the nation's children, their parents and their teachers".
The timing of the union leaders' criticism was particularly uncomfortable for Mr Blair, who had earlier unveiled the party's redesigned election slogan "Schools and Hospitals First", joined by smiling nurses and public sector workers. More importantly, the attack sets the scene for a potential clash between public service unions and Labour in a second term and, while Mr Blair insisted the choice was between investment in public services and Conservative plans to cut public spending, he conceded there had been much "pain and anxiety" over the health service.
"There is a lot of pain out there, a lot of anxiety, people waiting too long. What is the answer? The answer obviously is to keep the investment coming in. Our cause in a second Labour term and our crusade every day in the last week of this campaign will be to put schools and hospitals first, a cause and a crusade not just for the next seven days, but for the next parliament," he said.
Switching his attack, briefly, from the euro to the health service, the Conservative leader, Mr William Hague, toured a GP's surgery in Weston-superMare, near Bristol where he told voters the NHS was languishing "in a year-round crisis". The choice facing voters could not be clearer, he said: "It is between a government that, by its own admission, has failed once and would fail again and a Conservative Party that will create a modern NHS, built on respect and authority for doctors and nurses and efficiency, rather than bureaucracy and political interference."
But Mr Hague would not be totally blown off course on the euro and earlier, addressing voters from his "Keep the Pound" truck in the Tories' most winnable seat, in Torquay, Devon, he said: "We have seven days to save the pound . . . seven days to save rural Britain . . . seven days to set free the public servants who work in our vital public services, who have been so utterly let down by the incompetence and mismanagement of the Labour Party over the last four years."
Clashes over public services came as the Chancellor, Mr Gordon Brown, denounced as a "typical Tory smear" claims that he planned a "stealth tax" or means testing of child benefit for high-earning families.
The shadow social security secretary, Mr David Willetts, insisted Mr Brown would use the tax to fund public spending: "His plans to introduce an integrated child credit in 2003 provide him with an opportunity to do what he has always wanted. The new integrated child credit could cost £1 billion (sterling). It is not in his spending plans at the moment; he needs the money to finance it. It's the latest `black hole' in his spending plans."
The Conservative charge backfired when Mr Brown insisted he had already ruled out taxing child benefit, and he repeated the pledge again when he told ITN News last night that families could be "absolutely reassured" that child benefit would remain universal.
Conservative attacks on Labour over tax and spending and Europe have so far failed to reap any rewards for Mr Hague in the opinion polls. Two polls published yesterday by Gallup in the Daily Telegraph and MORI in the Times, put Labour 16 per cent and 18 per cent respectively ahead of the Tories. The Gallup poll put Labour at 47 per cent, down 1 per cent and the Tories on 31 per cent, also down 1 per cent, and MORI put Labour on 48 per cent with the Tories on 30 per cent.
Support for the Liberal Democrats, on 16 per cent in both polls, will provide the most satisfying reading for the party leader, Mr Charles Kennedy. Voters believe the party has run the most positive election campaign and the LibDems have picked up between two and three percentage points in the polls since campaigning began more than three weeks ago.