Go hard or go home. Such is the defiantly unrepentant response of those Labour people willing to defend the party’s digital attack ad on Rishi Sunak, which smeared the Tory leader with the accusation that he doesn’t believe that adults convicted of sexually abusing children should go to prison. All is fair in love, war and politics and there’s no shame in winning ugly if that’s what it takes to get to power. So say those who think they can justify the ad. Against them are ranged critics from across the spectrum, including many people normally sympathetic to Labour, who shudder that caricaturing the Tory leader as soft on paedophiles is a descent into a vile style of politics that Sir Keir Starmer’s party will come to regret. This unedifying episode has been revealing about the state of Labour. It has shone a light on the frustrations and fears among its senior team while exposing some fundamental divisions about what the party should be saying to the electorate and how it should be delivering its messages. Let’s start with where the shadow cabinet agrees, which is that there should be highly aggressive prosecution of the Conservative record and a gloves-on approach to the prime minister personally. There would have been no complaint had the ad straightforwardly denounced the Tories for presiding over cuts to policing and the decline of the criminal justice system. There has been little contention within Labour’s ranks about the rest of the tranche of attack ads unleashed to accompany campaigning in the local elections, including one on tax targeting the prime minister and his wife for her past exploitation of non-dom status. One of the complaints from his colleagues about Sir Keir used to be that he was insufficiently pugnacious in taking apart the Tories. So Labour MPs generally relish it when he brings fight to his game. The split is about where the boundaries should be drawn. “It’s about how you do it,” says a shadow cabinet member. One camp says the attack ad about sexual abuse was so obviously untrue and so inviting of condemnation that it should never have seen the light of day. The opposing side essentially contends that there aren’t any boundaries in modern politics. It justifies itself by saying the Conservatives will be viciously negative at the next election, as I expect they will be. Since their own record won’t give the Tories much of a platform to boast from, they will attempt to trash their opponents. Labour’s hard school also contends – again, correctly – that the Tories will try to besmirch the character of Labour’s leader. So get your retaliation in first, they say, and ignore the commentators and editorial writers who are tut-tutting from their pulpits. That unapologetic view is expressed by one senior frontbencher who says: “Look at the stuff the Tories have done to us over the years. Politics is a contact sport. It’s a brutal game.” That argument hasn’t been convincing even with their own side. David Blunkett, the former Labour home secretary, spoke for more than himself when he said that the “deeply offensive” ad left him “close to despair”. And he’s no one’s idea of a faintheart in political combat. Before sanctioning this ad, Sir Keir might have asked himself who has most to lose from a race to the gutter that leaves us with an entirely brutalised form of politics unanchored from any respect whatsoever for the truth. The Tories have many more accomplices in the media to help them with their dirtiest work than Labour can count on to do mud-slinging on its behalf. Does negative campaigning work anyway? Yes and no. It does when it sharpens the salience of a feeling that is already prevalent among voters. A classic of the genre was the “Labour Isn’t Working” poster created by the Saatchis for the Tories in the run-up to the 1979 election. Purportedly an image of a long line of jobless people – they were actually Tory activists – this resonated with voters because Jim Callaghan’s Labour government was presiding over a lot of unemployment. An attack that rebounded on its authors was the “Demon Eyes” campaign the Tories concocted against Tony Blair before the 1997 election in an attempt to suggest that he was the smiling mask of evil. Few voters thought he was Satan incarnate and most reckoned his changes to his party were authentic. That made the Tories look frantic and ridiculous. The attack ad on Mr Sunak makes Labour look deceptive and desperate. Party members have urged the deletion of the graphic. Many Labour MPs, including a lot of the frontbench, have declined to endorse it. Shadow cabinet members on media duty over the Easter period have sounded tortured when challenged to defend it. Sir Keir has insisted that he will “make absolutely zero apologies” and his party cannot afford to be “squeamish”. I guess he felt he could not back away without disowning his communications team and looking like a leader who wilts under fire. But I suspect he is going to be more careful about where he draws the line in the future. One of the alarming aspects of this episode for Labour supporters is that it has exposed some serious dysfunctionality in the higher ranks of the party. Since it was about law and order, her specialist subject, you might have expected Yvette Cooper, the shadow home secretary, to have been in the loop. Not so. Our political editor Toby Helm revealed that she did not know about the ad before it was posted on social media. This suggests a breakdown in basic communication and trust in Labour’s hierarchy. The local elections are supposed to be a dress rehearsal for how Labour will conduct a general election campaign in which the scrutiny will be many times more intense. The ructions over this will encourage Tories to think that Sir Keir’s team will crack under the stress of the contest for Number 10. Another thing this episode illuminates is the depth of Labour fears that the opinion polls have been misleading about the true strength of the party’s position. Labour surged into a 30-point lead last autumn during the madness of Liz Truss. That never felt “real” to the shadow cabinet – and so it has proved. Labour’s advantage was about 20 points at the new year, but many of its MPs worried that this was “soft”. The lead has been gently deflating over the past two months. The most recent poll of polls has Labour 16 points ahead; the Opinium poll we publish today puts it at 14 points. That’s still a huge Labour landslide at an election tomorrow, but the election won’t be tomorrow. The anxiety worming away in the guts of the shadow cabinet is that the Tories are gradually getting traction from their effort to promote Mr Sunak as the competent “Mr Fix-It” with the answer to the country’s problems even though many of those problems are a creation of the Tories. The prime minister has out-polled his party since he moved into Number 10. The Labour hope was that the unpopularity of the Conservatives would sink him; the concern is that he will buoy up his party. Hence the decision to go for attacks designed to despoil the Tory leader’s personal brand. This accentuation of the negative also betrays a lack of confidence about how to convey Labour’s positive messages. They exist, but Sir Keir and his team are still struggling to express them in a way that cuts through. An illustration of that is the many different slogans – by most counts, at least a dozen – that they have experimented with. The commonest complaint of potential swing voters is that they still don’t get what Labour really stands for. Sir Keir’s party needs to be putting more energy and creativity into presenting itself as fizzing with positive ideas for giving the country a fresh start. Labour should want to be viewed as an alternative government with an appealing prospectus, not just as an attack machine with a menu of complaints about the Tories. Truth to tell, most of the public have probably not paid a great deal of attention to the combustion over the ads. Voters have had other things on their minds over the Easter holidays. We also know the great majority say they are turned off by slime-balling. If this affair has swayed opinion, it is likely to have made people even more cynical about politicians than they were before. Which is not ultimately beneficial for Labour when its core proposition is supposed to be that politics can be a force for good. You can’t point to the stars from the sewer. Andrew Rawnsley is Chief Political Commentator of the Observer