Chris Mason's election road trip
Post categories: Chris Mason, election, politics
|15:25 UK time, Friday, 16 April 2010
Exhilarating, exciting - and, yes, very tiring. Yep, they are bags under my eyes, seeing as you asked!
Welcome to my election road trip 2010. It's my job at 5 live to report politics from as far away from Westminster as possible, and I love it. In the countdown to the campaign the milometer took quite a pounding - taking in Peterhead in Aberdeenshire, Ramsay on the Isle of Man and Hayle in Cornwall amongst many others. But that was just the warm up.
Today is Day 11 of the election campaign - so it must be Mansfield in Nottinghamshire. Since Gordon Brown went to see the Queen at Buckingham Palace a week last Tuesday, I've taken in Bury North for Breakfast, Liverpool Walton and Sefton Central for Gabby Logan, Chester for Drive, Barking for Weekend Breakfast and the Weekend News, Brighton for Drive and Ealing Central and Acton for Breakfast.
I've been here in Mansfield to take the temperature after the first prime ministerial debate. Outnumbered and Have I Got News For You were pretty popular here last night, but so was the debate. However plenty of people told me there was a big gulf between what they saw as the razzmatazz of the political circus and their day-to-day lives.
Next stop for me is Stirling - dust permitting! And forget that hackneyed old cliché that election campaigns are a marathon, not a sprint. They are longer than a marathon and at a faster pace than a sprint - and brilliant fun for it.
Mind you, when polling day was six weeks away this election felt incredibly close. Somehow, with less than three weeks to go now, it feels some way off!
You can follow my trip on Twitter and on AudioBoo and, of course, on 5 live where I will be doing a weekly round up every weekend on Up All Night.
Right, time to get back in the car...
Chris Mason is 5 live's political reporter
Comment number 1.
At 16:32 16th Apr 2010, minuend wrote:This comment was removed because the moderators found it broke the house rules. Explain.
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Comment number 2.
At 11:52 18th Apr 2010, Tempus Fugit wrote:"However plenty of people told me there was a big gulf between what they saw as the razzmatazz of the political circus and their day-to-day lives."
I concur. However, notwithstanding your trip to Cornwall, it would be nice if the "HQ" BBC (as opposed to BBC Spotlight) paid more attention to the south-west. The region is largely ignored by both the BBC and Westminster (except when there's a struggle for votes, of course) and, whilst this lack of government interference is nice, it doesn't help when there are problems to be sorted.
Come and spend a bit more time touring around here, where the LibDems are strong and see how tight-lipped they've been on the canvassing path about their real intentions with regard to the Euro, more power to Brussels, immigration and asylum and so on. If they spelled out what the small print says you'd probably find Clegg wouldn'tr have done so well in the poll after the leader's debate - where, naturally, the best actor won.
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Comment number 3.
At 18:41 19th Apr 2010, dennisjunior1 wrote:Chris:
Hope your journey across the United Kingdom is going off great!
(D)
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