Dave built a wall as hi-viz Sam looked on admiringly
Quentin Letts joins the PM for his 36-hour marathon
ELECTION campaigns, seldom far from madness, enter a peculiar twilight in their final hours. Yesterday Nick Clegg was on a bus in Scotland, heading northwards, ever northwards. Would he stop when they reached the sea? Ed Miliband was in a room somewhere, preparing for an evening rally in Leeds, reciting the mantra ‘I must not do a Kinnock’. And David Cameron completed a 36-hour bus trek from Hendon to Carlisle by way of Cornwall and a half-built orangutan enclosure at Chester zoo. Towards the end of his epic journey he was joined by his wife Samantha, loyally taut-trousered and trim. She accompanied him to a new housing estate in Lancaster where Mr Cameron laid a brick – if that is the term – and spoke yet again of Tory economic successes. The Camerons, looking every inch a couple of first-time buyers, then walked hand-in-hand out of a house – though they will be hoping not to move from 10 Downing Street just yet. I joined the Cameron charabanc: Ham hock sandwiches, giant bars of Dairy Milk and a certain crumpled gaiety. Tory aides were upbeat. Or was it merely relief that the five-week/fiveyear uncertainty was about to end? A bus trek offers therapy in the form of completism: Something the leaders can achieve when their fates have pretty much been decided. Better to keep busy, perhaps, than to ponder the uncertainty in a curtained motel room in Yorkshire. Soon after dawn Mr Cameron looked enviably chipper in a fresh-ironed, blue Jermyn Street shirt. He arrived at a sheep farm in (Lib Demheld) Brecon and Radnorshire, home to Huw Jones and Kayleigh Rees- Jones, their three children and 600 sheep. Farming neighbours had come to talk to the PM about bovine TB, among other things. Someone had erected a marvellously pointless security cordon in the muddy, empty farmyard, even though no ‘Tory scum!’ protester was within miles of this rural spot (your average animal-rights scruff tends not to rise before midday). As can happen in Wales, rain fell. Deep in the Brecons, the PM’s cologned communications supremo, Craig Oliver, unfurled a National Portait Gallery umbrella. ‘Good MORNING!’ cried Mr Cameron, spanking his palms and rubbing them like a cruise liner’s officer i/c morale. Isn’t there a law against being that Tiggerish before breakfast? In the middle of the night, somewhere in Bristol, there had been a stop at an Asda where Mr Cameron met the night- shift. By 10am we were in Cannock, Staffs, to visit a nursery school. Cannock Chase is a Tory- held marginal. Candidate Amanda Milling hovered. Mr Cameron was given a glittery blue star made by sweet Lily Benton, three. He reacted as though she had handed him the Kohinoor diamond. While Mr Cameron chatted to Lily’s mum Kate and others, photographers crouched to get close-ups. Watch out, chaps. Squelch. One snapper knelt on a wet patch. The PM’s visit had plainly been too much excitement for one toddler to bear.
ASwe bussed towards Chester, Mr Cameron emerged from his private compartment (which was by now covered in glitter from Lily’s star) and chatted. He had enjoyed this campaign more than 2010, he said, because he had an economic record to defend.
The uncertainty of the result lay in the collapsing Lib Dem vote. Where would it go?
He thought Ed Miliband had run an ‘antiseptic’ campaign. Opposition leaders could normally take risks – ‘he should be Mr Popular’ – but Miliband had been timid. ‘ It has been nerve-jangling from the start but I really feel bullish,’ said Mr Cameron.
With which we reached rainy Chester and the £40million building site where its zoo is creating an ‘immersive’ South East Asian complex with monsoon forest and Bali starling temple.
Soon, Sumatran tigers will prowl here. There will be cassowarys, anoas, bantengs, babirusas and Visayan warty pigs. In its upper reaches, cheeky macaques and orangutans will swing. In its pools vast hungry sunda gharial crocodiles will lurk, teeth sharp as scimitars. The whole thing sounded disconcertingly like Westminster.
Mr Cameron (more of a rhinoceros lover, he) pronounced it all splendid. He shook the hands of construction workers who, like him, were wearing high-vis jackets, hard hats, safety goggles, gum boots. They all looked the same.
Was a single vote swung? I doubt it. But it filled the time before the Witching Hour now upon us and our imperilled kingdom.