Tory activists these days go to a lot of trouble to make their big name visitors feel welcome. T-shirts are pulled on – often bizarrely over long-sleeve shirts and even ties – while placards are waved and cries of "change" ring out.

Yesterday, it seemed they had gone to trouble of immortalising Conservative party chairman Eric Pickles on a pub sign. There was definitely a similarity between the straight-talking Yorkshireman and the bespectacled monk on the board 10 feet overhead.

Hands shaken, the assembled throng trouped up stairs and along corridors to a room so distant from the main bar I wondered if we were heading for Narnia.

This was Mr Pickles' third stop on a blitz of key target seats in Devon. Pootling around in a branded minibus, he heard on the radio Gordon Brown claim a pensioner was a "bigoted woman", in all its buttock-clenching awfulness.

He described Mr Brown's outburst as "extraordinary" and "completely unacceptable".

"If you don't like folks, get out of our business."

Mr Pickles told me later, leaning on the bar, that while all politicians get grumpy at times, they need to be prepared to get "roughed up a bit". This had already happened to him on the campaign trail.

It came close to happening yesterday when, uninvited, a local care worker appeared at the door to have her say. The new Tory administration at county hall was threatening cuts to her profession.

She asked if it was "alright" to ask a question. "If we don't like you we will ignore you," Mr Pickles replied. He was joking… I think.

The woman would not give her name but said movingly: "With what is happening now, I cannot take any pride in what I do. There is some days I leave work in tears because I can't provide the service I want to people who have paid their taxes and served the country."

Mr Pickles assured us George Osborne had it all in hand. The care worker was unconvinced, and still fears for her job.

Mr Pickles soon returned to the business of rallying the troops. In Newton Abbot it requires a 5.25 per cent to the Tories to oust the Lib Dem, Richard Younger-Ross.

"Do you want to put David Cameron into Number 10?" he bellowed. "Yes…" they replied. "It's like a Quaker meeting... with alcohol."

Mr Younger-Ross has had one or two issues with his expenses, in the shape of a "Don Juan" bookcase and hi-fi speakers. Mr Pickles said he was "not in the business of besmirching" rivals and even if Mr Younger-Ross was as "good as gold" he was still "in the way of a Cameron government".

So too are Labour MPs in Plymouth and Exeter, including Culture Secretary Ben Bradshaw. Mr Pickles has been eyeing up these majorities and thinks the Tories could take the seat. "I wouldn't be down here just for a laugh." Indeed not. A serious business, politics.

And we can all drink to that.

"She was just a bigoted woman" How Gordon Brown's fightback was derailed by a microphone Page 15