It is an interesting tactic. One that may well work. After all there are a lot of votes to be won for stability and good government in a time of serious uncertainty. So I expect that when voters enter the ballot box there will be a significant boost to the Conservatives from last minute safety first voting. It could be as large as a 5% shift from where ever the final opinion polls are. So my warning to anyone wanting to see change is not to get too excited until the votes come in.
The grounds for some degree of optimism are, however, firmly there. Asking voters to place their trust in the wisdom of the incumbent Prime Minister is a tactic that only works if you can keep them believing she actually is quite wise, quite strong and quite stable. Focusing everything on one great leader is considerably less successful if it turns out that she is ... well, let's put it charitably, less than great. Oh, alright, let's put it honestly. It has turned out that she has been a really very poor campaigner who dithers, changes her mind and isn't prepared to give us any idea of what we are actually going to get if we vote for her.
It was always going to be a touch difficult for Theresa May. Starting a campaign with a huge lead only leaves you one place to go and once a momentum builds up it can be a hard thing to control. She has, however, not helped herself one bit. I would like to think that her biggest mistake has been to refuse to announce meaningful policy on all the big issues of the day so that voters have become reluctant to grant her a blank cheque to deliver whatever kind of Brexit she felt like. I suspect that isn't what is really costing her votes.
For many voters what really counts is just a gut feeling of can they trust the candidate. A lot of them have decided that in her case they can't. There are good solid reasons for this:
1. May supported Remain - and tells us this was because she thought on balance it was the best thing for the country. Then she supported not just leaving but the hardest form of leaving she could find. She told us that was because it was the will of the people but I know a lot of leavers who don't want tariff barriers between the UK and the EU. I have also spoken on the streets to lot more people from all sides of the referendum on promises and threats who are not impressed by her sudden conversion.
2. May signed off on the budget before Hammond delivered it. Three days later she ditched the National Insurance rises for the self employed and blamed him for the policy. She has now kept him so far away from the campaign that it seems highly likely she intends to get rid of him and the blame and go for someone more radically right wing. Not exactly the actions of a woman you can trust.
3. May approved her party manifesto. The only one with no proper explanation of how the numbers add up. The one with the insistence that care costs are to be heavily individualised and a bad luck lottery is to be imposed on home owners. Then she declared two days later that she didn't really mean it. She didn't dare tell us what she actually did mean. But she was sure that she didn't mean what was printed in the manifesto and that a review would sort it all out.
4. She has tried to position herself as a woman who is standing up for the just about managing. So she has told us she is concerned about zero hours contracts. So concerned that she is holding yet another review that she can quietly decide to sideline the issue after the election.
5. She has told us she is going to support ordinary working people. Then patronised a teacher by telling her there is no magic money tree. I suspect that teacher is all too well aware of the shortage of money every time she tries to buy groceries using a salary that has gone down in real terms every year for ten years. I bet her friends in nursing understand that harsh reality equally well. Whereas May probably doesn't even know what she has got for the £400 billion spent on quantitative easing.
But all of these weaknesses pail into insignificance compared with the way she has behaved towards the electorate. She has acted like she doesn't want to turn up and debate because we must all trust her to be above all that. She even refused to go on Woman's Hour once she spotted that Corbyn had a bad time on it. She has tried every trick in the book to avoid talking to ordinary people either on the street or in a studio. On the only occasions she has been in front of a group of the public she has really struggled with their questions and she has never once engaged in direct debate with a politician who disagrees with her.
In short she has come across as shifty, unreliable, unfaithful to colleagues, under prepared, uneasy, and smug. Not a great combination for someone who has staked the whole election on her own personality. Even less impressive for a woman who insists that she is the only person in the country capable of leading Brexit negotiations.
The British people have a tendency to be good judges of character when it comes to an election. And the one thing they don't like from a politician is when they become smug and take the electorate for granted.
So it is just possible on Thursday that smug and unstable won't cut it. We can but hope. Well actually no, we can but carry on campaigning as furiously as we can to prevent the last minute safety first vote from leaving us with the un-safest and most wobbly Prime Minister of my lifetime.