Bartley Green has one of the highest rates of single mothers in the country, while Edgbaston, with its cricket ground and huge detached houses, is Birmingham’s most desirable place to live. In Harborne, you find academics and professionals. In Quinton live semi-skilled workers who turned to Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s but have mainly returned to Labour.

When Gisela Stuart became the first Labour MP for Birmingham Edgbaston, one of the earliest results on May 1, 1997, it became clear that Labour was going to win a landslide. But in 2001, this popular German MP increased her majority in an election when most seats saw a small swing away from Labour.

Now she is fighting a woman Conservative candidate, Deirdre Alden, which means that the constituency is bound to continue to return a woman MP — something that it has managed to do in every election since Dame Edith Pitt won the seat 52 years ago. The main national issue that comes up most is immigration.

Jacqueline Howell, 57, who lives in a rented house, could easily have been cast as Vicky Pollard’s gran in Little Britain. With a cigarette drooping from her fingers, most of her front teeth missing and standing in her stockinged feet, she lets loose.

“If I had my way,” she insists, “I’d take a gun and shoot Tony Blair. He’s a waste of space.” Soon she adds George Bush and Camilla Parker Bowles to the death-squad line-up. “Put the three of them together and you’ve got a trio!

“I think your policies on immigration could swing it for you,” she tells Mrs Alden. “If I was an immigrant, they’d give us a nice big house and a car and a mobile phone. This country is solely and purely for the immigrants. We may as well pack up and leave.”

“Yes,” agrees Mrs Alden. “We’re being swamped.”

Mrs Howell is cross about the local post office closing because it means she has to go to another one, and “I don’t like the Asian lady there”.

“Nothing would persuade me to vote Labour,” she avers. But is this a Labour convert to the Conservatives? No, it turns out Mrs Howell has been voting Tory ever since Margaret Thatcher was leader.

All the voters who complained about foreigners during our canvass were already solidly Conservative. Norma Mason, for instance, 59, a lifelong Tory, claimed that the French were paying asylum-seekers to come to Britain.

“My 90-year-old mother just had to pay £400 for a new set of choppers. Then you get asylum-seekers coming in and getting everything. It isn’t fair.”

Go to the much more deprived parts of the constituency, though, and it’s a different story. Canvassing with Gisela Stuart at the gates of Welsh House Farm School, surrounded by council houses and flats, we chat to (mainly) single mothers waiting for their children to emerge.

A few are completely disillusioned, like Ciara O’Reilly, who says: “This country’s gone downhill big time in the past few years. I don’t like Tony Blair. The Government make promises that they don’t keep.” Overweight and smoking furiously (the ground by the school gates is littered with fag ends), she talks of her “death trap” tower block, where she has been burgled five times. It turns out that she has never voted and won’t this time.

Philip Rogers, a 30-year-old, almost toothless dad with four kids, insists that “I’d vote for anyone as long as Tony Blair gets out. He’s the one that started all the trouble with the Iraqis.” But then he admits that he’ll probably vote Labour anyway. “Labour have promised more help for the hospitals and the Tories haven’t.”

Finally there appears a textbook Labour success story. At the last election, 28-year-old Michelle Clulee was visited by a canvasser who was so shocked by the state of her flat — damp had penetrated all the walls — that she sent a Labour councillor round to help.

“I’m now set up in a new house,” the mum of three tells me, beaming. “I’m taking an NVQ 2 in early years, I’ve got my kids in a crèche and I’m going to be a teaching assistant. Later this year, I’m getting married.” Before, she says, “I didn’t see a future.”

Having not been too sure about Labour, she is now certain to support the party. “What I like about Labour is they care for all kinds of people, from the bottom to the top — not like the Conservatives.”

It sounds like a scripted line from a party election broadcast. “How much did you pay her?” I whisper to Mrs Stuart afterwards. She swears blind the outburst was spontaneous. I think I believe her.

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