Theresa May is blitzing target seats in the final day rush before voters enter the polls

Labour MPs who see the Prime Minister in their constituency today should start worrying like a corrupt dictator when John Simpson comes through passport control

Theresa May and her husband Philip visit Smithfield meat market in London on the final day of the election campaign (Ben Stansall/AFP/Getty)

For those who spend their days glued to the rolling news channels, it can only have been like being back watching Live Aid in 1985, when by virtue of some teleportation miracle known as a privately chartered Concorde, Phil Collins appeared at both the simultaneous London and Philadelphia concerts.

One minute the Prime Minister was being jovially abused by some Labour supporting butchers at Smithfield market in London, then within seconds she was at a crown green bowls club in Hampshire before, with the morning not yet fully over, she was in Norwich, returning to her preferred setting of an out-of-town function room, with a thin shower of party activists for company.

Conspiracy theorists may in the future claim the whole thing was faked, done on a secret sound stage in the basement beneath No 10, the bowlers actors, the angry butchers a false flag operation, but unlike every other day of the campaign, some of it did appear to be real.

Conservative strategy, in these final hours, is to get the out to the constituencies that can still be coaxed your way, so if you're a Labour MP and Theresa May turns up in your seat today, it's rather like a corrupt dictator encountering the BBC's John Simpson in the arrivals lounge.

Evidently, the Conservatives think there are 4,000 nickable votes from Labour in the rather industrial seat of Southampton Test, or the Prime Minister would not have been staring at a crown green bowls match at 7am. But whether there are too many political swingers among the members, one of whom described themselves to an enquiring journalist as “extremely Conservative”, we shall have to wait and see.

In Norwich (to where I teleported, via Great Anglia Express) it is evidently Labour’s leadership hopeful Clive Lewis that the ruthless Conservative opposition vanquishing machine has in its sights. A Conservative victory here and it would be too late not to renew Trident. Labour would have been hit by one.

The Prime Minister is clearly up for the fight. Bounding on to the stage, past husband Philip, she did appear to have drawn a tiny sip from the same grail of humanity from which Jeremy Corbyn has been drinking freely for weeks.

“One simple fact no one should forget,” she said. “If we lose six seats, the majority will be gone.” If anyone is forgetting this, they have not been paying much attention.

She warned again of the grave consequences of “how everything depends on Brexit” and “getting the right Brexit deal”.

Of course, now as seven weeks ago, she maintains that “no deal is better than a bad deal”, even while ramping up the warnings on how much a bad deal – Jeremy Corbyn’s deal will destroy the country and wipe out your children’s future.

It seems now too hopeful to find out quite what the Prime Minister thinks Corbyn’s terrible, country-destroying deal would be. It can’t be “no deal” because we know that’s better than a bad deal. It can’t be, for example, making large payments into the EU budget, or remaining under the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice, or staying in the single market or the customs union. It can’t even be keeping freedom of movement, because these are all things that a year ago, Theresa May said were in the country’s best interests. She campaigned for them and then voted for them.

Too late now to deviate from the core message. “This is the most important election of my lifetime,” she said again. “The country faces a stark choice.”

Who do you want driving the country off the precipice? Theresa May or Jeremy Corbyn? It’s got to be one or the other.