Andrew Vine: Election view from the doorstep is one of uncertainty

While the party leaders are apparently at pains to avoid meeting the public, these foot-soldiers pounding the pavements and knocking on doors are at the sharp end, encountering the cussed and sometimes downright rude, as well as the friendly.

Little wonder then that a couple I encountered were a little frayed round the edges after several hours on the stump, the polish and enthusiasm of that day’s early start having been worn away.

One was Labour and the other Conservative, but I suspect that for all their differences, their days would have been strikingly similar had they sat down over a cup of tea and compared notes.

That’s because the tightness and uncertainty of the election’s outcome was staring both in the face at every door they knocked on.

Both felt they were on the back foot and not getting their party’s message across because of the unpredictability over not just who will win power, but who might hold the keys to Downing Street.

The questions each was getting were less about their party’s policies than what-ifs and maybes about the permutations of coalitions, backroom deals and even political coercion by smaller parties.

The Labour canvasser was the first I met, and could not quite stop himself rolling his eyes when asked if his party was going to be at the mercy of that most unfunny double act to come out of Scotland since The Krankies – Nicola Sturgeon and Alex Salmond.

He delivered a standard answer about no deals with the SNP, but when I persuaded him to abandon the script and tell me how his canvassing was really going, he dropped his guard.

The SNP question was everywhere, he said. Amongst blue-collar voters, the threat posed by Ukip wasn’t far behind, with a familiar refrain being: “I’ve always voted Labour, but...”

This was his fourth election as a canvasser, and the hardest to handle, even more difficult than the aftermath of the invasion of Iraq, and the consequent hostility towards Tony Blair.

The Conservative was a less experienced campaigner, but equally edgy when pressed about how successfully he was getting his party’s message across.

He’d spent as much time talking down Ukip as talking up his candidate, and was coming away from too many doorsteps feeling like a salesman for 
whom a deal was tantalisingly just out of reach.

If both had shared a pot of tea, they would undoubtedly have agreed that the outcome is impossible to call and traditional allegiances cannot be relied upon.

They might also concur that over and over again, they had knocked on a door ready with a pitch about the economy or the NHS, only to be wrong-footed by questions over the ins and outs of minority government.

The experience of both canvassers is the story of the uncertainty reflected in national opinion polls, played out on the streets of just one Yorkshire constituency held by both Labour and the Conservatives at various periods.

That uncertainty is likely to persist until May 7, when there will be many who do not make the final decision how to vote until they are in the polling booth with the pencil in their hand.

The doorstep debates that the Conservative and Labour canvassers were becoming involved in can be viewed as healthy. To both, it was evidence that voters are engaged, turning over in their own minds the dilemma of voting one way only to find that the result is possibly an outcome they do not want.

But it is also evidence that many are also nervous about tactical voting, with its uncertain consequences, and unsettled at the prospect of the degree of influence the SNP could wield.

The idea of a party that people in Yorkshire cannot hold accountable at the election, yet could determine how much they pay in tax or how the country is defended, is deeply unsettling.

So is the prospect of waking up on May 8 to a political tangle that may potentially make the delicate coalition negotiations of 2010 look like a walk in the park in comparison.

It’s no surprise that both 
the canvassers were feeling pretty frazzled after hearing these concerns aired over and over again.

They don’t have any reassurance to offer other than to urge voters to back their parties so that a firm majority one way or the other puts paid to any uncertainty.

The trouble with that is voters kept coming back with “Yes, but what if..?”

What if, indeed. The canvassers have nine busy days before them, but if they had another cup of tea together on the morning of May 7, the chances are they still wouldn’t be able to call the outcome.