Keith Lloyd is having difficulty rousing the Labour vote on Winstanton Street, a typical northern terraced street in Crewe. He's pushing leaflets through the doors of targeted Labour voters. "It looks wobbly for Thursday but never say never," he says with the optimism of the political activist.

There are two days to go to a crucial by-election for the government and the Labour vote is slumbering.

Further up the road Tom Harris, the Glasgow MP, is having the same problem. No-one is in to answer the doors. There's no irony in having the minister for trains campaign in the most famous railway junction in Britain. It's all hands to the pump as Labour tries to confound every poll that shows its vote disintegrating and projecting a Tory win in a seat that had been Labour's for years.

He finds Madge Preece at her front door in Ford Lane, where she has lived for more than 50 years. "I've nursed the sick and dressed the dead in my time," says the 84-year-old widow. She won't be voting this time either, despite pleas from Mr Harris. Like a lot of people who would appear to be natural Labour voters she's sitting this one out.

"People still want us to succeed, but they are disappointed with us rather than angry," says Mr Harris, already preparing the ground for what looks like the inevitable. "We have found ourselves not talking the language of the voters and they are desperate for us to reconnect."

The language Mrs Preece talks is that of the conservative working class that David Blunkett used to champion. People who have worked all their lives only to see others "reap the benefits" as she puts it.

If Mr Harris wants a lesson in voter disappointment he ought not to go to the Crowning Glory unisex hair salon on West Street in Crewe. "I hope Labour get a battering on Thursday," says customer Barbara Mills. A care assistant, she is angry that two homes for the elderly are under threat of closure and she's angry over the Chancellor's £2.7bn solution to the 10p tax row that is the expensive lifeline that just might save the seat for Labour.

"There's plenty of money for everything else, but they expect us to pay for it," says Mrs Mills.

Linda Temporal, who is doing the styling, takes the trappist vow of silence that bar staff and hairdressers share when it comes to politics, but Debbie Hassall, who is having her blonde bop moussed, is, like other customers, unlikely to vote Labour.

"I know it's old school but being lenient on crime doesn't work," she says. She doesn't want to talk about the waste she's seen in her work in the health service. Local issues like these, dissatisfaction with crime and benefits culture, are playing well for the Conservatives.

They often say that the cobbler's children are the worst shod and, for the heir to a shoe empire, Edward Timpson has remarkably scruffy shoes. The Conservative may have worn them out by the end of this three-week campaign which might see him, at 34, on the road to Westminster.

In Crewe town centre the lunchtime shoppers warm to him easily. "I'm not making any assumptions for Thursday and we'll work hard until Thursday," he says in well-drilled candidate-speak.

Within a walking radius of Crewe station you might mistake this seat for natural Labour territory, working class, terraced and chain-stored to death. But a three-mile drive away is the more prosperous market town of Nantwich, a tidy dormitory proud of its status as a competitor in the Bloom for Britain competition. The fastest growing plants are the Conservative placards in the fields.

It is here that one of the issues at the core of the by-election becomes apparent - the character of Gordon Brown, who must by now be taking all these negative opinion polls personally by now. "It's OK being the strong, silent type as Chancellor but that doesn't work as the Prime Minister," says Diane, one of three young mothers strolling with their buggies past the town's gentrified boutique shops.

They are intelligent young women who have been bombarded with election literature from all parties but can cut through the political bombast. "People are looking for strong leadership and he's just seen as wishy-washy," says Diane of Mr Brown.

No-one knows what a foregone conclusion looks like, but Ladbrokes stopped taking bets on the outcome of the by-election on Tuesday afternoon with the Conservatives sure-fire winners.

Poor Tamsin Dunwoody, worn out by three weeks of campaigning, looks like she might be dreading her failure to keep the seat for Labour. She describes herself as a single working mother who knows what it feels like to have to strain to pay the mortgage.

On Radio Stoke the Prime Minister talks her up as an "independent woman with a great sense of purpose"

and dismisses his party's abandoned Tory Toff strategy as a by-election prank.

Come Thursday, it looks like the joke might be on him.