Party leaders make last gasp dash for election votes
Updated on 05 May 2010
All three party leaders criss-cross the country in a final plea for votes as opinion polls continue to suggest no party will win an overall majority in tomorrow's general election.
The Conservative leader David Cameron was engaged in an all-night push to try and win over voters, as the latest polls indicated he still does not have a clear majority.
He visited night workers at an engineering firm in Lancashire and then travelled to Grimsby to meet fishermen on the night-shift.
Mr Cameron told the shift workers that a Conservative government would sort out the "mess" the country is in.
He said: "There are millions of people still making up their minds. While there are still hours to campaign in, I think it is important to keep campaigning.
"I want us to have a new government with the energy, the ideas and the values to get our country moving."
Mr Cameron's 24-hour battlebus tour began in Scotland to attend a rally and then moved onto to Cumbria, where he tried some local fish and chips, before visiting firefighters in Carlisle.
Then it was Grimsby, where he chatted to fishermen and market workers, before handing out early morning leaflets in Nottinghamshire.
That was after a quick trip to a rally in Northern Ireland, where the party is fielding joint candidates with the Ulster Unionists.
Also featuring on his tour, which will end tonight in Bristol after almost 36 hours on the campaign trail, are supermarket staff, bakers and paramedics.
Mr Cameron thinks the tour is essential to his party's success in tomorrow's poll, as he is taking in marginal seats the Tories must win to regain majority power and avoid a hung parliament.
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Criticising his opponents, Mr Cameron said of Gordon Brown: "All he has done is talk about cuts this and cuts that and he has made up untruth after untruth. If this is the son of a preacher man, I don't know what we are hearing.
"Where has his 'moral compass' been for the last four weeks?"
Mr Cameron also mocked Liberal Democrat policies on housing and immigration, saying Nick Clegg's party represented "a change for the worse".
Mr Cameron was grabbing some sleep in the back of the bus between visits in a bid to stay fresh in the run up to polling day.
He will visit constituencies in the West Midlands and mid Wales before a final rally in Bristol tonight.
Earlier he was endorsed by Simon Cowell in The Sun newspaper who said he believed Mr Cameron had the "substance and the stomach to navigate us through difficult times".
This came after celebrities Ross Kemp, David Tenant and Duncan Bannatyne showed their support for Labour and Daniel Radcliffe and Armando Iannucci backed the Liberal Democrats.
The Tories have received support from the singer Gary Barlow.
Brown's match
Gordon Brown -who matched Mr Cameron's all-night jaunt with a series of late night events - told nightshift workers at a steelworks in Sheffield: "Scratch the surface. The Tories may have changed their tune, but they have not changed their minds."
And this morning - after a 5am start - he gave an impassioned speech in Bradford - saying there were signs that people were "coming our way". He said there were fundamental choices at stake tomorrow - and declared the economy would be judged by how far it lifted up the poorest in society, not the rich. And he insisted again that Conservative plans to make immediate, sweeping cuts in public spending, would put the economic recovery at risk. You cannot prepare Britain for the future, he said, if your policies are a throwback to the 1930's.
The prime minister will finish his campaign with trips to Lancashire and the Scottish Borders.
Clegg campaign
Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg decided against an all-night campaign - today pledging to "stretch every sinew" to reach out to undecided voters.
In a speech in highly-marginal Eastbourne this morning, Mr Clegg urged voters to "Make your voice heard". He said there was 36 hours to "do something different", insisting that if David Cameron or Gordon Brown got into Number 10 then "nothing will really change at all".
Mr Clegg hopes to persuade disillusioned Labour supporters to turn to the Liberal Democrats, denying suggestions that his party was slipping in the polls and describing it as the only real choice for change.
Mr Clegg will visit more target seats in a last day of campaigning before he stages a final rally in Sheffield.
Polls
The latest opinion polls suggest the election is too close to call.
A ComRes for ITV News and The Independent poll shows the Tories on 37 per cent, Labour on 29 per cent and the Liberal Democrats on 26 per cent.
These figures would leave Mr Cameron with the most seats, but it still would not be enough for an overall majority.
The poll also suggested that nearly four in 10 voters were still undecided, which means there is still a lot to play for on the final day of campaigning.
The daily YouGov tracker poll for The Sun suggested the Liberal Democrats could be losing ground. This would benefit the Labour party if played out tomorrow.
The Tories were unchanged on 35 per cent, with Labour up two on 30 per cent and Nick Clegg's Liberal Democrats down four points on 24 per cent.
This would mean a hung parliament with Labour as the largest party.
Tactics
The hunt for last minute votes came after a day of political arguments over tactical voting, following articles written by Cabinet ministers Ed Balls and Peter Hain.
They indicated that it may be beneficial for Labour supporters to "act intelligently" over who they back in seats that were straight fights between the Liberal Democrats and the Conservatives.
However, Mr Brown and the other senior Labour officials distanced themselves from these arguments, stressing they wanted Labour voters to vote Labour and fight for a Labour majority government.
Mr Brown said: "I want every Labour vote because I think people will look at the votes as a whole and they will look at what Labour has achieved."
The Tories reacted by branding the ministers "desperate" and releasing a campaign film highlighting Labour's broken pledges from the past 13 years.
Nick Clegg also rejected the idea of tactical voting, telling voters to follow their "hearts" when in the ballot box.
