David Cameron’s 72-hour tour of Britain has finished up in the north west this afternoon. I have followed the Prime Minister to two campaign ‘events’ this afternoon — both purely for photo opportunities and neither involved meeting any ordinary voters. By this point in the campaign, knocking on doors is probably not the most effective use of time, so the best Cameron can hope for is to look enthused and feature in some colourful snaps.
His first major event of the day was at a building site at Chester Zoo, in the heart of the Northern Powerhouse. A new tiger pen is being constructed, an ideal opportunity for the Prime Minister to point at rocks and piles of mud. The media pack waited in the cold rain for around 30 minutes to watch Cameron walk by into steamy room. He appeared on the other side, walked across a bridge and that was it. He took off his hi-viz gear and hopped back on the Tory battle bus. The workmen on the site appeared to enjoy it.
The Tory entourage then drove 80 miles north to another building site, this time for houses available under the last government’s Help to Buy scheme. Again, the media pack and Team Cameron donned hi-viz gear to watch the PM point at newly built houses and onto a building site. There was a digger and some work men milling around who were jolted into action as soon as Cameron appeared. He chatted briefly to the construction workers, patted them on the back and even lent a hand by laying a brick or too. Cameron, now accompanied by his wife Samantha, joined the local Tory candidate Eric Ollerenshaw to meet a family who purchased one of the Help to Buy houses on the building site for a brief chat. And then he was off.
After a brief helicopter ride to Scotland, for one last nudge to help David Mundell, Cameron will make his final appearance of the campaign at a rally in Carlisle. It’s a key spot: one of the most northern towns and an ultra marginal with Labour. Although there haven’t been many opportunities today for the Prime Minister to appear ‘pumped up’, he will certainly be showing as much as energy and emotion as possible this evening.
Similarly to some of the events Isabel described earlier in the campaign, these visits were highly choreographed and designed purely for the news bulletins this evening. Although this may seem a depressing note to end the campaign on, the other party leaders have been doing much of the same.
UPDATE: David Cameron has just held his final event of the campaign: a rally at an animal auction house in Carlisle, which smelt slightly of excrement. With his sleeves rolled up and no jacket, the PM was clearly in his pumped up mode — although he was exhausted after his final 36 hour manic trip around Britain . He began by reminding the crowd of Tory activists the importance of voting in tomorrow’s election:
‘Tomorrow is decision day, the big one. This is the biggest and most important election in a generation in our country.’
Cameron also tried to show the moral purpose behind his fiscal objectives. He said that he is not a ‘demented accountant’ obsessed with cutting the deficit, but he pursues it ‘so this generation can say it did the right and not leave unsustainable debt to pay off’.
The Prime Minister also offered a promise and a warning to the crowd. The promise was that if there was a Conservative government on Friday, he would keep Britain on the same track of growth and prosperity it has been on — while the warning was, unsurprisingly, about voting Ukip, Lib Dem or Labour and how it will put the SNP in a position of power, or the ‘people who don’t want our country to succeed or exist’ as Cameron put it. The ‘there’s no money left’ was brandished yet again, to the joy of the crowd.
Again, this rally was an example of what my colleague James Forsyth has described as ‘the essay crisis Prime Minister’: when it matters, he always delivers the goods, albeit at the final hour. The speech this evening was just the right balance of emotion, core message and passion. And typically from Cameron, it was delivered 12 hours before the polls open.
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