UK: For political drama junkies, this is theatre writes Kathy Sheridan in Dumfries and Galloway
For political drama junkies, Dumfries and Galloway has it all. It's the seat of the only remaining Tory MP and therefore totemic; can you really purport to be the party of government if you have no seat in Scotland or Wales?
It also hosts a gladiator-style, fight to the death for two sitting MPs, one Labour, one Conservative, forced to go head-to-head due to a redrawing of constituency boundaries. So the one certainty is that an outgoing MP will not be back. The fact that the notional Labour majority is all of 141 votes, while the bookies are making the Tory the clear favourite, and a TV poll suggests that the Tories will actually come out to vote, makes it pure theatre.
In the new scheme of things, Russell Brown's previous Labour majority of nearly 9,000 means little. He now has a constituency that runs more than 75 miles between the towns of Dumfries and Stranraer.
The conventional wisdom is that Labour rules the towns, while the Tories run the vast expanse of country in between.
A complicating factor is that Peter Duncan, the Conservative elected four years ago, is no old Tory ogre, but a decent, hard- working MP, if a trifle dull.
Russell Brown came in with the 1997 landslide, a classic son of Labour stock, who worked his way up from the bottom in ICI and married a school cook.
Passionate, energetic, warm and straight-talking, he admits that come Thursday he has a lot to lose if the bookies are right. "I've nothing to go back to. But if I get voted out, that leaves my three staff out of a job as well. And they have families too."
Duncan, he implies, has a rather more comfortable family business to fall back on. "I'm running on three things," he jokes, "anxiety, anguish and adrenaline. We'll know which was the right one on Friday morning."
Today, accompanied by about 15 highly motivated volunteers boosted by the canvassing skills of the genial outgoing MP, George Foulkes, his sprint through a council estate and Labour heartland makes him look like a shoo-in. Faces light up at the sight of him.
"Ach I've met him a hundred time", laughs a woman, when asked by an activist if she wants to meet the candidate. A driver stops to offer to put up a poster in his garden. There is the odd hug and a kiss on the cheek.
"He wrote to me when he heard I had cancer," says a woman through quivering lips.
As he races around, he has a ready retort to the friendly teasing. "There's a wee one about that man creeping in through your back door", he says with mock menace, handing out the leaflet showing a rather sinister "Michael Howard" peering around the door of a darkened room below the legend, "Don't let the Tories in the Back Door".
But every bout of banter is rounded off with an earnest reminder to come out to vote: "Two minutes is all it takes and it will make all the difference," he says.
In this constituency, the election staples of Iraq and immigration barely get a look-in. With predictions of a plummeting native population, Scotland is actively seeking legal means by which to attract more immigrants.
As for the war, Brown rebelled against his own Government - "I felt we needed additional international support" - and as a result had to resign as parliamentary private secretary to the Leader of the House of Lords. "What I say to people is 'look, if you stay home, you punish me, not Tony Blair, and as an added twist, you get a Tory in who'll boast about supporting the war'."
An activist murmurs: "We have had problems separating Tony Blair from the party. You have to remind people that a leader can be dealt with."
The issues here are the day-to- day ones, like schools, pensions, health and above all, dentistry.
The sudden defection of a succession of dentists from the NHS to the private sector in recent weeks has caused havoc for thousands and Brown is both suspicious and angry about its genesis.
Brown's greatest challenge - apart from getting his vote out - is to woo those who once voted [ Scottish] Nationalist "to keep the Tories out" to switch to Labour.
The SNP candidate, Douglas Henderson, will not be in the final shake-up, but his supporters could have a big say in which of the outgoing MPs make a triumphant return to Westminster.