Politicians are falling over themselves to attract us
The work and pensions secretary knocking doors in Netherton; George Osborne working with molten glass in Wordsley and UKIP's Nigel Farage dropping in to the Express & Star – what more proof is needed that the West Midlands is a big deal?
The political parties are falling over themselves in the Black Country and Staffordshire. It's a wonder they have yet to bump into one another. The Conservative and Labour parties are still going all out for the prospect of a majority government.
The opinion polls do not back this up.
So the Black Country and Staffordshire are even more essential than many other parts of the country because they contain so many of the key marginal seats.
Dudley South and Stourbridge, for example, where George Osborne and Iain Duncan Smith were out and about yesterday, are right next door to each other and both had Labour MPs until 2010.
Dudley North, where Labour clung on by a whisker, is just over the road and is high up on UKIP's target list. The battle was always close between the Eurosceptics and Labour. The near self-destruction of the Conservative campaign in Dudley North in recent weeks has only added to the drama.
Candidate Afzal Amin resigned after it was revealed he had met with the far right English Defence League to discuss the prospect of the group arranging and then calling on another protest march against the planned Dudley Mosque.
The challenge for the Tories is to convince people they made the right decision in kicking Gordon Brown out of Number 10 and that they deserve more time to 'finish the job'.
But Mr Farage threatens to undermine the Tories because he offers both disaffected Conservatives and disaffected Labour voters another option, in the way the Liberal Democrats did before they were encumbered by government.
The polls suggest the UKIP bubble may be bursting after last year's surge in the European elections. Yet the scenes that greeted him here last night suggested not.
As he stood on Queen Street, outside our offices people stopped, pointed, filmed him and came up to shake his hand. The irony for him is that with his own fight in South Thanet so close, he might well have boosted the campaign in the Black Country, only to resign in May empty handed.
