To a hot little room at a Redditch community centre last night for Sir Keir Starmer’s final rally of the campaign.
About 70 enthusiastic, whooping, pink-faced activists heard the same old stump speech from a Starmer who seemed visibly more confident. His trouser belt was a little looser after 42 days of campaigning, too.
One old gent on sticks had stuck a ‘Change’ sticker on his forehead. A bossy official pushed us journalists around.
Ed Miliband’s ex-spin doctor, the millionaire Tom Baldwin, who wrote Sir Keir’s admiring biography, loomed in the margins, clenching his jaw. A happier sight was former home secretary Jacqui Smith, Labour MP for Redditch until it went Tory in 2010.
Sir Keir said ‘change’ 18 times in eight minutes and blinked at the activists’ cheers. If the rest of Britain is amazed that he may be about to become PM, so, perhaps, is the dull pudding himself.

Sir Keir Starmer laughing next to parliamentary candidate for Carmarthenshire Martha O’Neil on the final day of campaigning at the West Regwm Farm in Whitland yesterday

The Labour leader pictured stepping off the stage at the Caledonian Gladiators Stadium in East Kilbride on July 3
He spent much of the day in an aeroplane. On cloud nine or pointlessly going round in circles in the air? Pick your analogy.
He had a breakfast link-up in Carmarthenshire with Vaughan Gething, Labour’s scandal-hit first minister of Wales. Carolyn Harris, a Swansea MP, was in tears of high emotion. The coolest person was Stephen Kinnock’s wife, Helle, a former Danish PM. Pink training shoes for her. Then north to some basketball court in South Lanarkshire, just as opinion polls were saying the Scots Nats were ahead of Labour. After that everyone clambered back on Sir Keir’s aeroplane for the shindig in Redditch. Electioneering has a logic all of its own.
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The Reform party leader Donald J. Farage, in double-breasted blazer and tan slacks, spent his last campaign hours on the Essex riviera at Clacton-on-Sea. Mr Farage visited a boxing gym where he leapt into the ring with another professional pugilist, Zimbabwean-British former heavyweight Derek Chisora. Big Derek posed for snapshots with his right glove ‘punching’ Mr Farage’s jaw. Mr Chisora’s grasp of constitutional affairs was a work in progress. Quizzed as to why he was supporting Reform, he gazed adoringly at Mr Farage and said ‘God save the King’. Don’t give the man ideas, please.
For Mr Sunak, a last day of torments: an interview on ITV’s This Morning. Pingy smiles, pastel colours and talk of how his favourite food was sandwiches. A fellow guest was Becky Holt, ‘Britain most-tattoed mum’, clad in not much of a bikini. She praised the PM for his ‘beautiful skin, lovely eyes and amazing teeth’ (she offered no verdict on his manifesto) and said she would be adding a picture of Mr Sunak to her inkings. Quite where she could fit this in, it was hard to say.

He posed for a selfie with Helle Thorning-Schmidt, Former Danish Prime Minister at the farm in southwest Wales

Prime Minister Rishi Sunak appeared on ITV’s This Morning yesterday morning (pictured)
Mr Sunak also travelled to Romsey, Hampshire, to campaign for Britain’s snootiest Tory, the wet-as-moss Caroline Nokes. The PM escaped hateful politics to roll Play-Doh and chat with primary school tiddlers. There is joy to be had in life after all, dear soul. He said Ms Nokes ‘worked her socks off’ in the Commons. Working your socks off is Rishi’s favourite phrase. He may be vapourised tonight but he has certainly worked his own socks off in 10 Downing Street. But all for what?
M eanwhile, TV’s Carol Vorderman, a hot-to-trot plutocrat Leftie, gloated about ‘wiping the Tories out for a generation’. Stanley Johnson, publicity-prone father of Boris, said he was voting Lib Dem. Laurence Fox, actor turned anti-woke warrior, advised his ‘followers’ (aka Doug and Brian from Brentford) to vote for Reform.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is your lot. The election campaign, c’est fini. Six weeks of Tarzan chest-beating (Farage), hiding from voters (Starmer and Sunak) and puerile watersports (Lib Dem leader Sir Charlie Chaplin).
With an anguished France returning to the polls on Sunday and the United States facing the mother of all presidential contests, this campaign may not linger long in the memory. But the result might.