11:41

Angela Eagle, Labour’s shadow business secretary, said she felt the election was “on a knife edge” and Labour had to focus on areas where the party could get the best support out.

“It’s harder to get a feel for a referendum than in a general election,” she told the Guardian on the Labour battle bus in Birmingham, as part of a day of campaigning with senior Labour women. “Anyone ought to be worried about the polls that show we might, in nine days, be voting to leave because of the effect that will have on people I have spent my life representing.”

Immigration was not always the main issue on the doorstep for those who were leaning towards leave, she said, but also a general feeling of frustration the slow pace of change in their local communities.

It’s a visceral us-and-them thing, not only immigration at all. The feeling is ‘why doesn’t anything change? how can we make things better?’ When you explain the figures though, then it’s different. That’s why I said, ‘get that lie off your bus’ [about the £350m-a-week to the EU slogan on the Leave campaign bus]. It’s a lie. The Turkish poster is a lie. And it’s being done by a cabal of right-wing Thatcherites who don’t want to save the health service and don’t give much of a damn about public services in this country, so for them to campaign as if they do is fundamentally dishonest.

Though unwilling to tell the prime minister directly to give way to Labour voices, Eagle said his TV appearances “do not help with the Labour vote.”

It would be helpful though, we are trying to get our messages heard about the general psychodrama of the blue on blue attack. That is sucking all of the oxygen out of the room. Jeremy [Corbyn] is up and down the country, pursuing an itinerary that would make a 25-year-old tired, he has not stopped. We are doing our best, but if we are not reported, it is very difficult. This whole thing is about Tory big beasts having a battle like rutting stags, but it’s far more important, this vote, than any of that.