The advertisement pictured right which featured in three of today’s newspapers shows Mr Blair

The advertisement (pictured right), which featured in three of today’s newspapers, shows Mr Blair with a pair of demonic eyes, taken from an earlier Tory poster which is now on hoardings all over the country.
The campaign, commissioned by the Conservative chairman, Brian Mawhinnney, will heighten claims that the Tories are indulging in American-style negative campaigning. The Labour Party recently hit back with a campaign combating what it sees as distortion and urging the public to “read between the lies”.The Tories’ latest advertising push aims to capitalise on the row over Clare Short’s article in the New Statesman last week. The “New Labour New Danger” slogan is used above a caption which reads: “One of Labour’s leaders, Clare Short, says dark forces behind Tony Blair manipulate policy in a sinister way.”Then the caption adds, quoting from Ms Short’s article: “I sometimes call them the people who live in the dark.” The poster adds a quote attributed to Ms Short on New Labour: “It’s a lie. And it’s dangerous.”That quotation, which is taken out of context, will particularly anger Labour officials.. Clare Short has given her backing to a US-style overhaul of the social security system which would involve the unemployed losing their benefit if they repeatedly turn down jobs.

The gesture, designed to rebuild her credibility with Labour’s modernisers, came as the party leader, Tony Blair, raised the stakes in its internal dispute by planning to use the forthcoming vote on his pre-manifesto document as one of confidence in his leadership.
Ms Short, whose New Statesman interview provoked a Labour crisis last week, went out of her way to make it clear she will side with modernisation when she takes up her role on a new Labour committee, set up to consider how to get people back to work.Her allies stressed that shewould not oppose plans, proposed by the shadow Chancellor, Gordon Brown, to take child benefit away from some parents of 16- to 18-year-olds.Ms Short, who met Mr Brown to discuss the committee last Wednesday, also supports measures that go beyond existing policy. Tim Wirth, now Undersecretary of State for Global Affairs, quit the Senate in 1992. Little wonder that, when it comes to policy, there is so little to choose between Mr Dole and Mr Clinton; that during the last decade, according to well- documented research, 99 per cent of the new wealth generated in America has ended up in the hands of the richest 20 per cent of the population.Not all politicians in Washington play the game gladly. The figures might be even lower if more people knew how many corporations gave money not just to one party but to both. Last year more than 300 donors – mostly giant enterprises such as Nabisco, Chevron and AT&T – gave soft money to both the Republican and the Democratic parties.

It is a practice so crassly bereft of principle that the only possible result, as Ralph Nader has observed, is to “breed cynicism that these parties are really one corporate party with two heads wearing slightly different make-up”. Hence the reason that in presidential elections only half of eligible adults turn out to vote, in congressional elections a third. He lost his temper, accusing his interviewer of pandering to “liberal media opinion”.The lesson was not lost on viewers that it was Mr Dole, the archetypal Washington politician, who was doing the pandering Hence the cynicism. If he said yes he risked losing television-advertising money from the tobacco people; if he said no he would upset many voters.