Hi-vis jackets for a lo-vis UK general election

Eighteen hours before the polls opened in the UK's general election, the prime minister visited various southeast Asian islands.

David Cameron did not actually go to Southeast Asia, merely a simulation of it under construction in Cheshire. Had he really gone to Bali or Sumatra, he might have met quite a few British voters, something the three main party leaders have been doing the utmost to avoid for the past six weeks.

If he comes again in July, he might be able to meet the new Asian inhabitants including Sumatran tigers, crocodiles and Visayan warty pigs, immigrants all, but apparently welcome ones. The kids would enjoy that and, who knows, this prime minister may then be an ex.

By July this will be a new extension to Chester Zoo. Right now it is a building site, of a peculiarly puzzling kind. Mr Cameron was shown past the mock temples and the dragon bridge briefly, in a howling gale. He was wearing his familiar daywear of hard hat and high-vis jacket and was almost lost among the other hard hats. Some of us began humming numbers from the Jungle Book. "Trust in me" was voted the most appropriate.

He made no speech, neither activists nor even the orang-utans being available to applaud. But the cameramen had got shots that might prove to regional TV watchers that the prime minister had cared enough to come to the City of Chester (Conservative majority: 2,583) and that they should therefore vote for his candidate. Even though no one outside the zoo knew he was there.

Then he shook hands with his hosts and was gone. The zoo officials looks a bit puzzled: they are used to dealing with mysterious forms of animal behaviour but the conduct of a modern election is as yet beyond human understanding.

It was not all zoos, you know. At midnight he had been in an all-night supermarket in Bristol (but met no shoppers). At 6am he was having tea at a remote farmhouse in a Welsh farmhouse. Then it was yet another kindergarten. Coming next: a housing development in Lancaster. Of course he met voters: more than a dozen in all, I'm sure.

Nick Clegg, meanwhile, was on his way to the northern tip of Scotland, avoiding voters by going where there hardly are any. Ed Miliband was reportedly just preparing his final pre-election speech, the quaint old-fashioned thing. Maybe Labour activists were too busy canvassing to take time off to act as his wallpaper.

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I could sense very little political interest among the racegoers. Some of them, especially the ones in heels, were not even bothered about the horses. But there was a market move for Come on Dave in the 3.45. This matched the growing sentiment in the political betting market that the Tories might win. The horse came nowhere.

But maybe the voters will indeed be impressed by Mr Cameron's final cross-country rush. They probably will not stop to consider the strangeness of a politician going to a marginal seat amid the frenzy of race week and heading instead for a building site: a symbol of a political class disconnected from its voters. Thus the campaign of 2015: hi-vis jackets for a lo-vis election.

Some sentimentalists like to believe that voters, like juries, have some mystical ability to come up with the right answer at the right time. What price no one voting for anyone?

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