Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Theresa May: EU and European press trying to affect the result of the UK general election with Brexit "threats" and "misrepresentation"

Forget for a minute the bombast of Theresa May's claim this afternoon - her claim based, Tory sources admit, on the existence of anonymous briefings thought to come from the EU Commission - that Brussels is trying to interfere in our election.

Look more broadly at the lines of her high voltage statement this afternoon - have we just witnessed the birth of Project Fear 3.0?

Not just her "trust me, not him" line, not just her "coalition of chaos" line, not just "who do you want around the negotiating table".

But a Lynton Crosby mash-up of suggested risks to voters, all packaged up in a matter of moments.

The message screamed out, in essence: Vote May, or Brexit will be a disaster, because that Jeremy Corbyn will simply roll over in the face of those nasty Brussels bureaucrats, and guess what - your children will pay.

An argument with not one, but two bogeymen, with the notion of "Brussels" and the Labour leader.

Consider this line: "The opportunities you seek for your families will simply not happen.

"If we do not stand up and get this negotiation right we risk the secure and well-paid jobs we want for our children and our children's children too."

Those two sentences could quite easily have been lifted from one of David Cameron's speeches in the closing days of the referendum campaign, or from one of the unionists' side in the Scottish independence debate.

Famously those tactics ended in disaster for that campaign on one occasion, victory in the other.

It's not surprising that the Tory campaign is going after Jeremy Corbyn in this election.

Nor surprising that Theresa May, having chosen to call an election for a Brexit mandate, will use the circumstances to her advantage.

But the surprise is that at this early stage, with such a gap in the polls, the Tory campaign has already hit this note in the scale.