“It’s getting to look a lot like Christmas, lots of ho ho ho/But the prettiest sight to see, will be Jeremy by the tree...Of Number 10’s front door”
Wearing a flat cap to keep out the winter cold, shadow transport secretary Andy McDonald couldn’t resist leading a singalong when Jeremy Corbyn arrived in Middlesbrough for his eve-of-poll campaign visit.
There may be 13 sleeps to Christmas, but there was just one night before polling day as the Labour leader toured through the country on his final push for votes.
From Glasgow to the north east, from the Rother Valley to Bedford, his last day of campaigning saw Corbyn and his tight-knit group of staff snake their way down the backbone of the UK before ending with a final rally in east London.
The themes through the day were familiar - saving the NHS and the planet, ending austerity, homelessness and child poverty - but the delivery was confident and fluent. As an underdog who defied the odds two years ago, Corbyn seemed even more relaxed than usual on his various campaign stops. He was indeed heading for government on Friday, he said.
When asked by a reporter how long he would stay in post if he lost, he replied: “I think you should concentrate on the election and the fact that Labour is going to win the election.”
But perhaps in a sign of the coming narrative should all the polls prove right and the Tories get a majority, he was careful to also repeatedly attack the “billionaires” who run Britain’s media.
“We now have had 51 days of this campaign and 51 days of unbelievable levels of abuse hurled at leading figures of the Labour Party, unbelievable levels of character assassinations going on against our party and our movement,” he said in Middlesbrough. “And I simply say this, if you wish to inhabit the gutter, that’s absolutely fine by me but I will not be joining you there.”
Having cancelled a planned visit to Ashfield in Nottinghamshire (a wise move, cynics would say, given voters’ views of him locally), Corbyn also ditched a planned trip to Broxtowe amid suspicions he was again running behind schedule.
He turned up 50 minutes late in Bedford, a true ‘Corbyn surge’ seat taken from the Tories in 2017 by a wafer-thin margin of just over 700 votes. The crowd gathered in the Addison community centre weren’t too bothered by the delay, with young toddlers running about and middle-aged men wearing red scarves with the word ‘Corbyn’ emblazoned on them.
Outside, an ad van carried the slogan ‘Lower Fares And Bills’ like a Black Friday special offer and a reminder that Santa Corbyn has a bag full of policy presents, ranging from free broadband to 5% pay rises to the abolition of tuition fees. And as one GMB union ad put it, a vote for Johnson is for five years, not just for Christmas.
Inside, the tinsel hanging from the rafters, activists were rocking around the Jezmas tree as Wham crooned ‘Last Christmas’ from the speaker system. A small choir got on stage to sing ‘Silent Night’, the first verse in German. Then, after all the waiting, their hero arrived and local candidate Mohammad Yasin welcomed Corbyn on stage to huge cheers.
Corbyn revealed that the party had raised £5m for its election fund, with 200,000 donations of just £25. Always in his element on the campaign stump, he seemed almost sad that this was his final, 85th marginal constituency visit.
He couldn’t resist ridiculing Boris Johnson’s apparent pre-dawn decision to duck a TV interview by heading for a huge refrigerator. “We put ourselves out there.. I take questions on our manifesto, John McDonnell does, as does everyone else. I don’t have to go and hide in a fridge when somebody comes to ask me a question!”
The crowd loved that, of course, and they enjoyed Corbyn’s impromptu session as Rory Bremner, giving a half-decent impersonation of the PM at the Commons despatch box. “The day after he was appointed prime minister, he turns up in parliament and says ‘we’re going to build 40 hospitals’. So I said to him ‘where are they?’ ’I don’t know..”
After what he called a “death stare” from his aides that he was running even more late, Corbyn ended with an almost Dickensian farewell worthy of a Christmas Carol. “Be of good cheer! Be of good confidence! Go out tomorrow, snow, hail, rain, sleet, sunshine, whatever!”
In a converted warehouse in Hoxton, its local Labour MP Meg Hillier told the activists waiting for Corbyn’s final appearance before polling day that the east London seat was both “achingly cool” and “achingly poor”.
The few hundred diehard fans in the crowd were revved up by Grace Petrie, a young singer-songwriter who was a longtime staple of Corbyn’s leadership campaign events. Leading them in songs that slated Tony Blair as much as Margaret Thatcher, she asked them to “stand up today, to save tomorrow”, even though with polls opening in just over nine hours it was “late in the day”.
Dawn Butler, the shadow equalities minister who also serves as Corbyn’s chief hype-woman, told the crowd to touch the person next to them - “not in a bad way” - and reassure them “my friend, you’re not alone”.
Three miles away to the east in the Olympic Park, Boris Johnson was on stage for his final rally of the Conservative campaign.
As Emily Thornberry spoke in Hoxton, a ComRes poll suggesting the Tory lead was down to five points was published online. The shadow foreign secretary, who has largely been kept under wraps by the party during the campaign, said Labour had “proved the establishment wrong” in 2017 and “we can show ’em again.”
Corbyn, greeted on stage with the traditional chant of “oh Jeremy Corbyn” as well as a impassioned shout of “we love you” from one young woman had a simple ask of his party. “Tomorrow you can shock the establishment, by voting for hope,” he said. Campaign, he added, “like our lives depend on it”.
Butler told the audience to this Christmas give the country the “present that keeps on giving - a Labour government”. Because the thought of losing, she told the crowd, “is just too much”.
As Corbyn left the stage, one young, loyal party member had his own verdict. “It’s terrible now,” he said. Seeing his friend’s puzzled expression, he explained: “The optimism.”