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At first sight, Keir Starmer's decision to play the race card against Nigel Farage appeared to drop out of a clear blue sky.
'Do you think it's a racist policy,' the BBC's Laura Kuenssberg asked the Prime Minister on Sunday as they discussed Reform's plan to scrap indefinite leave to remain. Sir Keir hesitated, apparently weighing his response, before replying: 'Well, I do think it is a racist policy. I do think it's immoral.'
But what appeared to be a rare off-the-cuff answer from the PM was in fact part of a carefully calculated strategy borrowed directly from Emmanuel Macron's bruising battles with France's populist leader Marine le Pen.
In the days that followed, Cabinet ministers lined up to savage Mr Farage, with some directly accusing him of racism, and Deputy Prime Minister David Lammy even claiming, with zero evidence, that he had 'flirted' with the Nazis – a deliberately poisonous claim which he had to retract within hours.
Sir Keir also used his speech at Labour's annual conference in Liverpool to ratchet up the rhetoric against Mr Farage, branding him an 'enemy' of Britain.
All of this was deliberate. After watching Labour slide further and further behind Reform in the opinion polls, ministers have abandoned their previous approach of simply trying to ignore the party.
Instead, they have turned to what has been dubbed the 'Le Pen strategy', borrowed from across the Channel.
The plan, which has been discussed at meetings of the Cabinet, involves demonising Mr Farage to such an extent that no 'decent' person would consider voting for him. It is no coincidence that the central message of Sir Keir's speech was that Britain is facing a 'fork in the road' between 'decency and division'.
The hope is that Labour can persuade millions of people who have peeled off to the Lib Dems and the Greens to return to the fold and vote tactically to keep Mr Farage out. One Cabinet minister said: 'We are the only party that can stop Farage and we can squeeze the other progressive parties by capitalising on that.
'That means exposing Farage for what he really is and setting it up as a battle for the soul of the country. But it also means delivering on things like scrapping the two-child benefit cap to give people on the Left a positive reason to vote for us too.'
Another senior Labour figure said: 'We have seen in France that you can win from the centre against the populists by turning the election into a referendum on the far Right. Macron beat Le Pen twice by spelling out her racism and positioning himself as the bulwark against it.
'In the end, supporters of the other parties – even those who hated him – held their noses and backed him to keep her out. We can do the same here with Farage – are Lib Dems and Greens and even moderate Tories really going to take the risk of letting him in? I don't think so.'
The strategy is high risk. Mr Macron did beat Ms le Pen in 2017 and 2022 by branding her a racist and galvanising the supporters of other parties behind him. But Ms le Pen's National Rally party gained in popularity each time.
Mr Macron pulled off the same trick to a lesser extent in the legislative elections last year, successfully keeping National Rally out of power. But the outcome left the French political system paralysed, with four prime ministers coming and going in barely a year.
In any case, the French electoral system is very different. Importantly, Mr Farage is not Ms Le Pen, whose father's party was widely considered racist for many years. In 2014, the then Ukip leader even refused to form a pact in the European Parliament with Ms le Pen because of her party's 'prejudice and anti-Semitism'.
Many Labour MPs are rightly nervous that this week's attacks will leave Reform supporters feeling smeared. Labour officials may see it as a strategy for clinging on at a national level, but in seats across the Red Wall, where so-called progressive voters are not so plentiful, it looks like a recipe for defeat.
But Sir Keir is in a hurry. Next May's elections in Scotland, Wales and English councils are being billed by his rivals as the litmus test of his leadership. If he cannot find a new way to neutralise Reform by then, he could find himself not so much at a fork in the road, but at the end of it.