The polls say its Labour's day today but Kathy Sheridan detects a grumpiness among the electorate
It is possible to find places here where no one mentions Iraq. However, you learn quickly to draw no inferences. Iraq hardly needs to be mentioned anymore. "It just seems to have seeped into the ether," said a senior politician yesterday.
Around ordinary people, it has become a synonym for high-level chicanery and spin and nothing is untouched by it.
"Iraq" explains why it's possible to travel thousands of miles at the height of an election and never see a campaign poster that features a picture of the prime minister - apart from the enormous hoarding being driven through the marginals by the Tories, picturing a cheesily smiling Blair and the mocking message: "Imagine five more years of him". Canvassers in die-hard Labour heartlands have grown accustomed to grim-faced voters nodding: "No, can't do it, not for Tony Blair"
In Dumfries & Galloway, a Scottish marginal where the hard-working, anti-war Labour incumbent is hanging by a thread, an activist despairs. "You try to tell them that the party is about more than Tony Blair, that the leader can be dealt with... But it's hard to make them see..."
For the beleaguered canvassers, there is an even more maddening beast. This is the angst-ridden traditional Labour voter, the type who might, just might, be persuaded to stick with Labour if provided with a nose-peg - but if offered a real choice of candidates (not a given under this electoral system), may opt for the Lib Dems, knowing they haven't a snowball's chance of forming a government but hoping to "send a message" to Tony Blair by way of a humiliatingly reduced majority.
The problem is that in constituencies like Birmingham Edgbaston, where Labour's Gisela Stuart is challenged by a strong, moderate Tory candidate, this is a highly risky strategy, so risky that it may send the angst-ridden ones scuttling back to Daddy today.
Or it may see them staying at home. It's the factor that has made this election so intriguingly hard to call.
There is a fine tradition of candidates and canvassers dismissing polls that don't suit them - "it's not what we're hearing on the doorsteps" - but the poll most serious door-steppers would agree on is the one that puts the "undecideds" at well over a third of the electorate. That's 15 per cent higher than four years ago.
Iraq has hijacked the doorsteps, bogging them down in the fudgy issue of trust, real or contrived, and triggered a thousand ripples.
"Of course it was Labour councillors who were found guilty of 'corrupt and illegal practices' - I'm just quoting the judge - with postal voting last year," said a gleeful Tory activist in Birmingham. The judge compared the system to that of "a banana republic".
Yet 15 per cent of the electorate have used it this time - an average of about 10,000 per constituency, where seats can change hands for a few dozen votes - even though massive numbers distrust it. "That's Labour for you. Who trusts anything they say or do?" snorts the Tory.
Britain is suspicious and disgruntled but when asked why, it flails around looking for reasons. "Why did Blair go for an election so early?" wonders an office worker in Bristol, after a long pause. "He went over a year early. Does he know something about the economy that we don't?"
But even this 50-something man admits that, in the famous phrase, Britain has never had it so good. There is a prosperous buzz around cities like Birmingham, Bristol and Cardiff.
The 5,000 redundancies at MG Rover in the West Midlands caused barely a ripple; even the Tories admit that there are plenty of blue-collar jobs where they came from. Immigration was a Tory chartbuster in the shires as well as in working-class areas where stories about immigrants using benefits to buy fast cars and getting £50,000 to move into areas to protect ministers' majorities are taken as gospel.
"Blair is a smarmy cow. Unless you live in the inner city, you can't know what's going on. My kids will never get a council house. The immigrants are pushing it. They play the race card too often," says a taxi driver.
"I hate Labour for immigration. I believe in live and let live but you've got to call stop. They're getting new houses, new colour TV, furniture, bus passes, clothing," raged a McDonald's "customer relations" man, who swore he is Labour. But: "I think I am a Conservative now. I believe Howard would send them back."
Even that debate took an unexpected turn when Scotland's first minister said he couldn't get enough immigrants.
Britain in Europe was the electoral dog that failed to bark, ignored even by Tory strategists in favour "of issues the people feel matter most to them".
Fox hunting - despite the occasional well-funded onslaught on Labour hustings by Otis Ferry and friends - was another largely silent animal.
In Edinburgh South this week, when given the usual two minutes to state their priority, the Conservative said his was to save the regiments, the Lib Dem mentioned Iraq, the Scottish Nationalist said economic independence. The Labour man drew broad audience approval by saying that his was "fighting for justice for pensioners, against world poverty..."
But the floating voter who dropped in to the same Labour man's office a few days later merely wanted to know where he stood on the proposed £3.5 billion national ID card scheme. "It's a civil liberties issue," said the voter, who made it clear that his support today hinged upon it.
Meanwhile, a Bristol academic, eyeing the crane-filled skyline and all the signs of a city on the rise, recalled years of official neglect and depression and tried to interpret the national disgruntlement. "I think it's just another symptom of the disposable society. People get bored. They want change for the sake of it."
Try telling that to the Muslims of Birmingham or Bradford or Bristol, enraged by years of "being taken for granted" by Labour and for whom Iraq has become a symbol of every word and deed of disrespect they perceive to have been heaped upon them since 9/11. An awkward truth is that the five Birmingham councillors found guilty of industrial-standard postal vote fraud were from the Muslim community. "Would you mention this if they were six Irish Catholics?" challenges a Muslim teacher.
Probably. One way or another, distrust and disgruntlement rule.