Liberal Democrats are one stunt away from polling day and feeling optimistic about result

ITV News' Chloe Keedy reports on the last day of the Liberal Democrats campaign events

On the final day of their six week election campaign, the mood on board the Lib Dem battle bus is one of cautious optimism.

Over the past five days we’ve travelled the length of Great Britain on a tour that has taken us from John O’ Groats in the north of Scotland down to Land’s End at the tip of Cornwall.

The south west is somewhere the Liberal Democrats are hopeful of making significant gains from the Conservatives, but say their own internal polling shows that many seats across Somerset, Devon and Cornwall are now on a ‘knife edge’ and will go right to the wire.

Throughout the course of this campaign, the party has concentrated its resources in constituencies where it thinks it can win.

The focus, one senior Lib Dem source told me, is on winning parliamentary seats and not national vote share.

This is a marked and deliberate departure from its approach in 2019, which party strategists believe was at least partly to blame for its poor performance at the last election.

One positive, said the source, was that the party emerged from that election with a £2.5 million financial surplus, which has been spent on funding a bigger field team to fight this election.

The party claims its canvassers have now had 5 million conversations on the doorstep during the course of this parliament, a strategy it hopes will pay off on Thursday when people head to the polls.

It’s a return to the strategy adopted by the party in 1997, under Paddy Ashdown, when the Lib Dems gained a record 26 seats.

Another key Lib Dem strategy this time has, of course, has been to litter the party’s campaign with a string of eye catching stunts.

Sir Ed Davey kicked off his final week by doing a bungee jump in Eastbourne, and this morning he was racing a big yellow tractor around a field in Chippenham.

Not everyone has liked the way he’s carried out his campaign, but Sir Ed says he believes that doing the stunts has allowed him to talk more about Lib Dem policy than during any campaign before.

So has it worked? Party officials on board the Lib Dem bus, Yellow Hammer One, are feeling quietly confident but still refuse to spell out - in terms of seat numbers - what they think would be a good result.

The party hopes to overtake the SNP and once again become Britain’s third largest party. That would mean they’d have more influence in parliament, with the opportunity to ask more questions in the Commons - a prospect Sir Ed described today as "nirvana".

We are now one stunt away from polling day and not long until finding out whether the Lib Dems' strategy has paid off.

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