LABOUR's election anthem, Things Can Only Get Better, was tipped to top the pop charts last night. More importantly, Labour entered the final weekend of the campaign with a new opinion poll giving it a big lead with London voters.
As the party launched its manifesto for the capital, a poll for LWT said 54 per cent of Londoners were backing Labour, with the Conservatives on 32 per cent and the Liberal Democrats on 10 per cent.
The poll boost came as Mr Blair and Mr John Major continued their bitter war of words over Conservative pension plans. The increasingly personal exchanges overshadowed Labour's focus on crime, and, helpfully for Mr Major, the increasing isolation of Chancellor Kenneth Clarke over the party's attitude to Europe.
Mr Paul Sykes, the Yorkshire multi-millionaire backing Tory Euro-sceptics, yesterday launched a massive advertising campaign inviting people to vote Conservative "to end the single currency". With an estimated 240 Conservative candidates reportedly signed up, the advert declared: "The vast majority of Conservative candidates have ruled out joining a single currency.
But a defiant Mr Clarke said his colleagues were wrong: "I don't think it's in British interests to make that decision now. I actually think we should continue to be very closely involved in all the discussions about it. It may be to our advantage, it may be to our disadvantage. But the right time to make that decision is later, when we know more about it.
Meanwhile, Labour kept the pensions row at the forefront of the debate, with Mr Blair and Mr Gordon Brown repeating their charge that a re-elected Tory government would abolish the state pension and replace it with privately purchased provision.
Mr Major dismissed the Labour claim, declaring: "It really does bring politics down into the gutter when people bring charges like this they know in their hearts to be false. This wasn't a casual, tossed-off remark by Mr Brown or Mr Blair. This was a carefully calculated, carefully prepared, campaign against the Conservative Party to frighten pensioners into believing that their security and their state retirement pension was at risk."
At his morning press conference, Mr Major said he would walk out of Downing Street, out of politics, and trigger a general election if his cabinet ever attempted to push him into scrapping the state pension.
But Mr Blair said Labour was right to subject Conservative proposals to scrutiny: "There is no doubt that the purpose (of the proposals) is to replace the basic state pension with a private pension."
Speaking to the BBC, Mr Major said: "People can be better off but nobody is going to be worse off." Pensioners need not be frightened: "It isn't at risk, neither is their childrens' pension at risk, neither is their grand-childrens' pension at risk. What the Labour Party is doing is the most contemptible act of partisan politics that I can ever recall."