As sharks respond to blood in the water, so do journalists to panic among politicians - and there is panic in the air as the election campaign enters the home stretch.
It's still hard to see how the Conservative Opposition could win on Thursday, but there is suddenly a chance that the governing Labour Party could lose its majority in Parliament over voter resentment at how Prime Minister Tony Blair dragged Britain into war.
Blair almost got away with it. For most of the campaign, he avoided any serious debate on his decision, and on every other issue he was fireproof: the economy is among Europe's healthiest, unemployment is less than half that of France or Germany, and New Labour has poured money into health and education.
Then came the first in a series of well-timed leaks about how Blair tricked his Cabinet, his party and the country into believing that the war was legal. All last week the media were full of the text of legal opinions previously suppressed by Blair in which his own officials had warned him about the doubtful legality of the war, and retired senior military officers revealed that they had been deeply worried about it, too.
The anger many Labour voters had felt about Blair's deceptions flared up again, and suddenly the election was a horse-race.
Disaffected Labour voters would never give their votes to the Conservatives, whose leader, Michael Howard, had eagerly supported the war - but they might give them to the third-place Liberal Democrats, the only party that openly opposed the invasion of Iraq.
That could turn significant numbers of marginal Labour seats into Lib Dem or even Conservative ones, depending on which Opposition party was in second place locally.
Panic: suddenly Blair was all over the media warning: "It's Labour versus Tory [Conservative]. Anything else is a Tory vote by the back door."
Even in my own central London constituency, which has been a safe Labour seat since shortly after King Arthur's time, a hastily printed one-page flyer was hand-delivered to our house on Sunday in which our Labour MP, Frank Dobson, in effect begged us to ignore Blair and vote Labour anyway. If you "plan ... to vote Labour through gritted teeth, I understand that feeling", it read.
Stressing that he personally had voted against the war, Dobson hammered home the message that "a Tory Government is the only alternative [to voting Labour]".
Only that isn't really true, and many habitual Labour voters have figured that out. The papers are full of cut-out guides on how a tactical vote for the Lib Dems would affect the outcome in each constituency, plus the crucial information that almost no amount of anti-Blair tactical voting by Labour supporters could give the Conservatives a majority.
What tactical voting could do, on around a 10 per cent swing from Labour to the Liberal Democrats, is deprive Labour of its majority in Parliament. Labour would still be the biggest party, and would almost certainly form the next Government, but it would have to be either a minority Government with outside support from a (much bigger) Liberal Democrat contingent in Parliament, or even a formal coalition with the Lib Dems.
In either case, it is very unlikely that Blair - "the young war criminal", as Alan Watkins, doyen of British political columnists, calls him - would remain Prime Minister. His own party is full of people who loathe him and accept his leadership only because he is allegedly a sure-fire election winner, but they would quickly turn and rend him if he stumbles.
Besides, any arrangement for informal support or a formal coalition with the Lib Dems would probably require an early decision to dump Blair and pull British troops out of Iraq.
How likely is all this to happen? Not all that probable, really.
The Liberal Democratic leader, Charles Kennedy, has fought a lacklustre campaign, and the Conservatives have failed to stampede the electorate with a campaign that played up to fears of the immigrants and "asylum-seekers" inundating Britain. ("Are you thinking what we're thinking?" as a series of Tory campaign posters coyly put it.)
The Conservatives even imported Lynton Crosby, the Australian electoral guru who master-minded the return of Prime Minister John Howard for a third term on a platform of thinly disguised racism and xenophobia, to run their campaign in Britain.
It hasn't worked, however, as Britain is much more ethnically diverse than Australia: Conservative leader Howard is the son of Jewish immigrants from Romania and Ukraine. Tory support has scarcely shifted through the campaign.
The only thing that can shift the political landscape is Labour voters casting tactical votes for Liberal Democratic candidates, and while there will be enough of them to deliver a stinging rebuke to Blair for the war, they will probably not be numerous enough to deprive Labour of its majority.
<EM>Gwynne Dyer: </EM>Iraq leaks leave Labour fearing for its majority
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