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Campaign analysis: Sunday April 10
Daniel Forman's daily diary of the election campaign.
Sunday April 10 3:30pm GMT
If Tony Blair and Gordon Brown appear to have been inseparable in recent days it has not been an accident.
A joint visit to Rover's Longbridge factory on Friday, a joint interview in the News of World on Sunday and a joint party political broadcast on Monday follow a series of joint poster launches and press conferences last week.
The prime minister has likened his relationship with his chancellor to that of a "marriage" and, despite spending Friday, Saturday and Sunday with him, Cherie Blair may think the remark was more than a euphemism herself.
What has it all been about? In part it is playing on Brown's popularity and trust, something that Blair no longer has.
In part it is showing that they are, after everything, united in their ambitions for party and country.
But it is also about trying to show that Britain's economic success has not been an accident.
It is another reason why the economy was, until Sunday, virtually the only topic Labour and this column had stressed so far.
One commentator in the Times last week argued that growth would continue steadily whoever was in control.
The Conservatives point to the economic legacy Labour inherited from them, while Charles Kennedy tried to claim some of the credit for it himself by pointing out that independence for the Bank of England was a Lib Dem idea.
Such views would be a disaster for Labour if held more widely.
The party needs to embed the credit for the UK's success in the past eight years firmly in the public's mind.
Only on that basis does it want to debate its competing forward programme with the Conservatives, which is now beginning to be rolled out with education the next planned battleground.
But the danger is that so ingrained has growth become, partly because decision making has been taken out of the hands of politicians, that it is no longer seen as a political issue.
If, on the other hand, it can be politicised, then Labour hopes people will vote with their pockets and return them to power.
But expect it to continue to feature in coming weeks as Tory tax cuts are attacked and Blair and Brown remain joined at the hip.
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