With Rishi Sunak and Sir Keir Starmer attending events in France to commemorate the 80th anniversary of D-Day, Sir Ed Davey was the only one of the main party leaders to carry out a campaign visit on Thursday.
He made an appearance in Chippenham in Wiltshire: a constituency the Liberal Democrats would take from the Conservatives on a swing in the share of the vote of 13.1 percentage points, ranking it at number 45 on the party’s target list.
The Lib Dems won Chippenham at the 2010 general election then lost it to the Tories in 2015, who went on to hold the seat at both the 2017 and 2019 elections.
Secretary of State for Science Michelle Donelan was Chippenham’s MP from 2015 to 2024, but has chosen to stand in the brand new seat of Melksham & Devizes at this election.
In doing so she has gone from defending a notional majority in Chippenham of 13,200, to defending one in Melksham & Devizes of 17,028.
Sir Ed has now visited 16 constituencies across the UK since the first full day of the campaign, most of which (14) are being defended at the election by the Conservatives.
Sir Keir has visited 17 seats, 12 of which are Tory defences.
Rishi Sunak has visited 24 constituencies since the start of the campaign, 21 of which are being defended by the Conservatives.
Tory former chancellor George Osborne told the Political Currency podcast the seats Mr Sunak has been visiting show how concerned the Conservatives are.
“If you look at where Rishi Sunak has actually been over the last couple of weeks, that is the clearest indication of where the Conservatives think the battleground is,” he said.
“So first of all, he is hardly visiting any seats that are not held by the Conservatives, so he’s not even pretending there are going to be some Labour seats the Conservatives are going to be winning.”
He added that the places Mr Sunak has visited, including Harpenden in Hertfordshire and Macclesfield, Cheshire, “are traditionally safe, Conservative cities that I don’t think a Conservative leader would have visited in the general election in my lifetime”.