GE2019: The Prime Ministerial fight comes to Cornwall

This is proving to be the most high profile week of campaigning in the far South West of this General Election. On Monday Nigel Farage was in the Battleground seat of Plymouth Sutton & Devonport, while yesterday Jo Swinson campaigned for the first time in Cornwall in the seat of Truro & Falmouth.

Today Jeremy Corbyn makes his first campaign trip to the far South West with a rally in Cornwall and Boris Johnson is expected in the county too (he visited Somerset earlier in the campaign).

Leaders visits take a lot of organisation and don't happen unless the party feels it has something to gain by sending their boss to key target seats. I think this proves what we've been saying for so long - that the main parties believe that a number of seats, especially in Plymouth and Cornwall, are very much still in play in this unpredictable election.

For the Conservatives, Boris Johnson's ambition is to get a majority in this election and he knows that to achieve that, not only does he need to win seats in the North of England and the Midlands, but he can't afford to lose any ground in the West Country. The party wants to show that it isn't taking its eye off the ball here and today is its way of proving it.

Another West Country Battleground: Labour won this marginal seat in the 2017 election, but the Tories are hoping to gain it back this time. Credit: ITV West Country

As for Labour, Jeremy Corbyn will be wanting to show that his party believes it is the main challenger to the Conservatives in seats like the two in Plymouth (Labour had one in 2017 and the Tories won the other), Camborne & Redruth and Truro & Falmouth. Both the Brexit Party and the Lib Dems want to show that they're a threat to the two larger parties in the seats they are standing.

As each party comes to our part of the world they each unveil a policy they hope will chime with West Country voters. Today Boris Johnson will pledge to make "the scourge of poor mobile phone reception in rural areas" a thing of the past. He's announcing that if he wins this election, in the first 100 days he'll fast-track plans to agree a billion-pound agreement between the mobile phone providers to pool their phone masts and build more.

Jeremy Corbyn, on the other hand, will speak about climate change and how it should be tackled - it was Labour who made the last Parliament declare a climate emergency. Jo Swinson's Lib Dems felt the environment message would chime well with the West Country voters too, with a pledge to 'wage war on plastics' and create conservation zones along half of the UK coastline by 2030.

Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn went head-to-head in a the first leaders debate of the 2019 General Election. Credit: ITV/PA

Whilst the two main contenders to become Prime Minister next month will not cross paths in Cornwall today they are likely to do all they can to try and pick holes in each other's polices and personalities. Half of Cornwall's seats are very marginal and up for grabs at this election and the leaders know that if their visits today go well, they can help their party's cause. But if anything goes wrong, it could have the opposite effect.