Gordon Brown heads north to rally Labour supporters
Gordon Brown will rally Labour workers in Yorkshire today before starting to prepare seriously for the first of the televised leaders' debates.
The Prime Minister will be meeting campaign workers and visiting a health centre in Leeds as he keeps up his campaign tour of battleground seats.
But from mid-afternoon he is due to commit some time to readying himself for Thursday's three-way head-to-head with David Cameron and Nick Clegg.
The debate, to be held in Manchester, is the first of three that could dramatically alter the momentum of the campaign.
In advance of the highly-anticipated event, Mr Brown said he was "not so good" at the presentational side of politics and stressed he was not a "personality" that told people what they wanted to hear.
In an interview for ITV's Tonight: Spotlight on the Leaders programme, he also said he was shy, admitting he was in a "very strange profession" for someone like that.
Mr Brown has sought to portray himself on the campaign trail as a figure of "substance" as opposed to Tory leader David Cameron's "style".
He has dismissed the need for "pyrotechnics", insisting voters will vote for Labour on its record in dealing with the recession and setting out a serious plan for the future.
Labour was given a £400,000 boost to its campaign-fighting coffers by enterprise tsar Lord Sugar.
The party is notably less well-funded now compared with the 2005 election campaign, in which then prime minister Tony Blair travelled frequently by helicopter.
Mr Brown has travelled mainly by car and train, apart from a return flight to his Scottish constituency last weekend.
Lord Sugar, star of BBC show The Apprentice, said he had donated cash during previous campaigns - he donated £200,000 in 2001 and £150,000 in 1997.
Today, Gordon Brown accepted that it was a mistake not to have taken a tougher line with the banks when he was Chancellor. He said that the banks should have been more tightly regulated in the years before the financial crash.
Asked again on Tonight: Spotlight on the Leaders about mistakes he had made, he initially offered his decision to scrap the 10p rate of tax - something he has admitted in the past.
But pressed for a further example, he replied: "In the 1990s, the banks. They all came to us and said, 'Look, we don't want to be regulated, we want to be free of regulation'.
"All the complaints I was getting from people was, 'Look you're regulating them too much'. And actually the truth is that globally and nationally we should have been regulating them more.
"So I've learnt from that. So you don't listen to the industry when they say, 'This is good for us'. You've got to talk about the whole public interest."
With the polls still uncertain about the outcome of the May 6 poll, Chancellor Alistair Darling insisted yesterday the General Election would be "fought to the wire".
He said his party had "absolutely everything to play for" as he struck a distinctly upbeat note on the campaign trail.
Speaking to journalists on Labour's battlebus in the East Midlands, he also maintained the economy would continue to grow this year - thanks to his actions at the Treasury.
Mr Darling said: "We clearly go into this as underdogs. But as people become more focused on the fact that this election will determine the shape of the country, and the prospects of each and every family in this country for the next 10 or 20 years, I think we will become very focused on who is saying what or, with the Tories, who is not saying what.
"I think it's going to be a close contest, it will be fought to the wire, it will be fought to the wire in marginal seats up and down the country, and there's absolutely everything to play for."
Asked whether the latest GDP figures could sink Labour's campaign if they show the economy going back into decline, he said: "I forecast that our economy would grow this year between 1% and 1.5% and I confirmed that in the Budget in March and my forecast hasn't changed."
He also stressed that GDP figures from the Office of National Statistics were often revised, suggesting the first publication on the previous quarter's activity was not necessarily reliable.
"In the last quarter of last year they went up from 0.1% ... they ended up 0.4%, so you do get variations," he said. "There is always a risk when you look at figures on a week-to-week basis or a month-to-month basis, but when you look at the trend I am confident we will have growth this year of between 1% and 1.5%."
He said independent forecasters, including the OECD, were now backing his view, adding: "There is no doubt that it is a direct result of the policies I put in place, and every single one of them was opposed by the Conservative Party."
