"The old Tory government, well I was a rat in a wheel basically, I worked and worked and worked all hours that God sends and I couldn't really work out how to get married and have babies at that time, actually."
Labour's fourth party election broadcast, which will be screened tomorrow, offers no respite for the hard-working families whom Labour and the Conservatives have courted in past weeks. Get out and vote, is the message, or risk losing low mortgage rates/ child tax credits/ Sure Start (delete according to your income bracket). Arabella Weir does the voiceover - "When you're a mum you put your family first" - and the appeal is specifically to women, though Alan Milburn denied Labour was worried that female voters were defecting to the Lib Dems over Iraq ("I'm sure women voters are not thinking what Brian Sedgemore is thinking."). Most elections since the second world war had been fought on domestic issues, he said, and this one was no different.
The journalists were bored and restless. Milburn insisted that voters weren't: "It's not true. People find the issues interesting. The truth is that the debate never really settles on one theme."
"Forward not back", by the way, is, well, yesterday's slogan: Labour will be using "If you value it, vote for it" for the rest of the campaign. Newspaper adverts will use a red Labour arrow pointing forwards and a blue Tory arrow pointing back in an effort to drive home, as Milburn put it, that "this election is a choice, not a referendum".
