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The day after the debate before

By Malcolm Boughen

Updated on 30 April 2010

The day after the final leaders debate and all three main parties are out putting the best possible gloss on their man's performance while preparing for the last few days of campaigning ahead.

Gordon Brown (Getty)

Buoyed by what the polls and the morning papers judged was a victory in the last of the General Election leaders' debates, David Cameron this morning unveiled what he is calling a Conservative Party "contract" with the people.

The "contract", which will be sent to millions of households in Conservative target seats, sets out 16 pledges, mostly culled from the party's manifesto. They include halting Labour's planned increase in national insurance rates, increasing health spending "every year", restoring the link between pensions and earnings and introducing the right to sack errant MPs.

It also pledges to protect free eye tests and prescriptions for pensioners, which was absent from the manifesto, but was promised by Mr Cameron after he was challenged by Gordon Brown during last week's leaders' debate.

"This is our contract with you," says Mr Cameron in a personal message accompanying the contract. "I want you to read it and, if we win the election, use it to hold us to account.

"With trust in politics at an all-time low, and people tired of politicians breaking their promises, we are saying clearly in this contract 'if we don't do these things, if we don't deliver our side of the bargain, vote us out in five years' time."

Mr Cameron, who spent the morning visiting schools in the Midlands, warned that the election was "far from won" and urged party workers to keep fighting until polling day next Thursday.


Gordon Brown, attending a Labour poster launch in the West Midlands this morning, made a similar pledge to fight "until the last second".

"The time for debates has finished - the time for decision has begun," he said. "We will continue to fight for the future of this country until the very last second of this election campaign."


Labour wheeled out one of its big guns this morning, with the former prime minister Tony Blair voicing his support for Mr Brown during a visit to a health clinic in the north-west London borough of Harrow.

"If people look at and listen to the substance, they will see somebody who is completely on top of his facts and knows exactly the policies that he believes the country should follow," said Mr Blair.

"When you start in an election campaign - particularly when you have a new thing, which is the debates - then it will all revolve around the fact of who's up and who's down and the rest of it. But once you get into the final days I think people will really focus their minds on who has the best answers for the future - who has got the energy and drive to take the country forward."


The Liberal Democrat leader, Nick Clegg, drew the biggest crowd of his campaign so far at a soap-box-style public meeting at de Montfort University, in Leicester, claiming the election was now "a two-horse race" between the Conservative Party and the Liberal Democrats. The question for voters was "Who do you trust to deliver the change and fairness that you want?"

"There are now six days to go in what I think is going to be the most exciting General Election campaign in a generation," he said. "We need real change, not fake change - and that is what the Liberal Democrats offer."

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