Sebastian Payne

With just under two weeks to go until polling day, the promises, threats and reassurances will kick up a notch as we enter the final stretch of the campaign. The Tories have another 5,000 businesses to back up their case for reelection, while Labour is turning to its favourite weapon of market intervention towards housing. To help guide you through the melée of stories and spin, here is a summary of today’s main election stories. 1. Building for Britain The Tories have tried to paint themselves as the party of home ownership throughout this campaign. But Labour is attempting to seize that mantle with several new policies on housing today. First up, a pledge to scrap stamp duty for first time buyers on properties up to £300k.

Membership of the Conservative Party has halved under David Cameron, leaving him with fewer activists to help him in this election than were available to any of his modern predecessors. So how to fight a Labour Party that has not suffered from the same hollowing out? One answer is to bus in activists, which is being done via Roadtrip2015 — a traveling ensemble of young volunteers who move around the country en mass for a day of campaigning in a key seat. This morning, a new phase of Roadtrip is kicking off as the election campaign enters into the final 10 days.

Lord Ashcroft has released his latest round of marginal polling, looking at some of the constituencies vital to the Conservatives’ hopes of remaining in power. Across the six competitive seats he has polled, there is a swing away from the Tories but this doesn't mean they will lose them. Three of the seats polled are likely to remain blue: Bristol North West, Colne Valley and High Peak. The interactive chart above shows the findings from each survey. These seats were three-way marginals in 2010 and the Tories thought that the substantial Liberal Democrat vote would be the hardest to tackle. But Charlotte Leslie in Bristol NW has campaigned hard to hold onto the seat and it appears she is safe with a nine point lead.

As polling day nears, everyone is trying to work out which way undecided voters will break. Contrary to what many predicted, Labour and Ed Miliband have had a pretty decent short campaign, although this hasn't yet led to a polling lead. But the key question is whether Miliband is winning support from the undecided voters. A recent poll from ComRes showed that the Labour leader isn’t viewed particularly well among this group. 28 per cent said they would want to see David Cameron run the country, compared to 16 per cent for Ed Miliband. This isn’t much of a change since before the campaign began. In March, 12 per cent of undecided voters said they would prefer to see Miliband in charge.

The opinion polls almost veered towards a trend today. ComRes/Daily Mail report in their latest poll that the Conservatives are four points ahead on 36 per cent, while Labour is on 32 per cent. Survation/Daily Mirror also put the Tories four points ahead on 33 per cent and Labour on 29 per cent. Alternatively, the latest YouGov/Sun poll has Labour two points ahead on 35 per cent and Tories on 33 per cent. With two weeks to go till polling day, it’s still very tight and no one has a notable lead. While the Conservative lead in the ComRes and Survation polls edges outside of the margin of error, the movements in these polls are still within three points. But one thing to note is the difference in the methods used to poll.

The Ukip fox may have entered the Westminster henhouse but how many more chickens will it kill? ComRes has released a new poll revealing that Ukip is trailing in third place in ‘ten Conservative-held seats which Ukip have targeted’. Across the polled seats, the Tories are on 39 per cent, Labour on 28 and Ukip trailing on 21. While the latter party's vote share has increased by 15 per cent since 2010, ComRes's findings suggests they will struggle to win thanks to the collapse in the Liberal Democrat vote. According to the poll, a quarter of Lib Dem voters in these seats say they will now back Labour and 21 per cent will back the Tories. But Ukip is not happy at all with this poll, with party source describing it as a 'terrible way of doing the poll'.

Isle of Thanet, Kent ‘Are you having me on?’ a lady shouts from inside her bungalow. ‘I’m going back in the bath.’ As with many residents of Ramsgate, this voter, who is wearing nothing but a towel, can not believe Nigel Farage is on her doorstep. The Ukip leader belts out his hearty laugh as her husband admits the pair will be voting Ukip — another tick on the clipboard. Farage's cabal of sign carriers and bodyguards shuffle towards the next house before we are interrupted by a group of goths keen for a selfie. They appear too young to vote but Farage happily obliges. Has he got a chance of winning here? In three hours of traipsing around doorsteps of South Thanet, before ending up in the pub, there were no negative reactions to Farage.

The Conservatives are ahead once again in the latest Guardian/ICM poll. They are two points ahead on 34 per cent - but that’s a five point drop since their surprising 39 per cent last week. Labour has dropped one point to 31 per cent. Two of the smaller parties have seen their vote increase, with Ukip on 11 per cent, up four points on last week, and the Liberal Democrats on 10 per cent, up two points. Last week’s ICM poll was clearly an outlier — few believed that the Tories had jumped into majority territory — but Conservatives will still be pleased that this poll has them ahead. But be aware that this lead is within the margin of error.

Nigel Farage tends to stick to one line on foreign affairs: no more foreign wars. On the Sunday Politics today, the Ukip leader claimed that the migrant crisis and tragedies in the Mediterranean are the fault of countries such as Britain and France who bombed Libya in 2011: ‘Actually, it was the European response that caused this problem in the first place — the fanaticism of Sarkozy and Cameron to bomb Libya and what they’ve done is to completely destabilize Libya; to turn it into a country with much savagery; to turn it into a place where for Christians the situation is now virtually impossible and we ought to be honest and say have we directly caused this problem.

Labour’s efforts to stem the nationalist tide in Scotland aren’t working. Lord Ashcroft has polled eight marginals north of the border and the results confirm that the SNP is on course to conquer Scotland. In three Labour-held seats — East Renfrewshire, Glasgow South West, Paisley & Renfrewshire South — the SNP is set to take the seats with double digit swings. The Nats are 11 points ahead in Paisley, previously held by Douglas Alexander. In Jim Murphy’s seat of East Renfrewshire, a one point Labour lead in February has turned into a nine-point SNP lead. The news isn’t much better for the Liberal Democrats.