IT was a day in which Tory tanks were supposed to have been parked on the lawn of Labour’s North-East heartlands, and it ended with the party leader rolling into a truck depot on the edge of Darlington, a seat she believes her party can win for the first time in 25 years.

For Theresa May, it was a journey back in time because it was in the North-East in 1992, in North West Durham, that she first stood for Parliament when she was 36.

“I remember how cold it was in Tow Law sometimes,” she says, remembering to correctly pronounce the placename. “I also remember how friendly people were when I was going round. Even if they weren’t going to vote for me, it was ‘good luck pet, I’m voting for somebody else’.

“And I learned what a beautiful part of the country it is.”

She scribbled her signature – a bit of an illegible scrawl – onto a faxed copy of her CV which survives in The Northern Echo archive, and found a way to translate her experiences against Hilary Armstrong and the Lib Dem candidate Tim Farron in 1992 into her messages for 2017.

Back then, she lost heavily – Ms Armstrong increased her Labour majority to 14,000. But in 2017, the polls, and the state of the Labour Party, suggest that she will do better. Yesterday lunchtime, she made a speech in Tynemouth, a seat the Tories lost to Labour in 1997, which the national media billed it as a daring sortie into Labour’s heartland.

Then, her blue battlebus – with her signature scrawled illegibly down the side – brought her into Davies Transport, a haulage depot in Darlington, which is a seat the Tories lost to Labour in 1992, when she was standing in North West Durham.

“I felt then that the people here were patriotic, had great pride in their region and wanted to make sure they and their children had a better future, good jobs, good school places, and that is why this election is absolutely crucial in terms of the future of this country,” she said.

Then she was away, into the well-rehearsed phrases that are already becoming a cliché.

“Getting it right over the next five years matters,” she said. “It’s about Brexit and going beyond Brexit with a vision for the future of this country and there’s a clear choice of who can deliver it: the strong and stable leadership of myself and my team or the coalition of chaos under Jeremy Corbyn.”

In Darlington, the sitting MP Jenny Chapman is defending a 3,158 majority and is making great play on the future of the local hospital. The NHS is drawing up Sustainability and Transformation Plans (STPs) which would create fewer, but better equipped and more efficient, accident and emergency departments in the region, with the fear that Darlington Memorial may lose out.

“The important thing about the STPs is that they are developed within the local area, local clinicians and local people looking at what is going to work for that local area,” she said. “It’s not about a model being imposed from Government – it is about what’s going to work in the local area.”

But under the Conservatives in the last five years, the number of people waiting longer than the target four hours in A&E has risen, according to a King’s Fund study released last week, from 725,000 to 2.5m people.

“Millions more people are going into A&E, the NHS is doing more operations and there are more doctors and nurses, and that increased activity is only possible, that staffing is only possible, if you have a strong economy, and so it is back to that choice about building a strong economy so we can fund a first class NHS, but Labour’s plans have what some say is a £30bn black hole in them, would wreck the economy.”

Just like Mr Davies’ trucks always stay on route, so Mrs May stays resolutely stays on message.

She insisted that the “northern powerhouse” did exist and its enabling tentacles would stretch into the Tees Valley. “It is about putting particular emphasis on what is happening in the north of England,” she said, “and it is part of our industrial strategy, of identifying particular sectors in particular parts of the country, to ensure that prosperity and growth is spread around the whole country.”

The Tees Valley, of course, was the scene of a surprise Conservative success a fortnight ago with the election of a Tory mayor, Ben Houchen, a result that has put a spring in the step of those activists who believe that parts of the North-East can be won over this time.

“He showed people there is a commitment to the area from the Conservatives and there is a desire from Conservatives to roll our sleeves up and get a better future for people,” she finished.

Then her convoy rolled out of the truck depot, but she had had time to share a cuppa and a biscuit with the drivers at Davies Transport, and with her Darlington candidate, Peter Cuthbertson, nodding sagely beside her.

It is a firm with 14 vehicles that was founded by Arnold Davies with one quarry truck in 1958 and is now run by his son, Jonathan. “She was very approachable and listened to the guys and answered them,” he said.

“We enjoyed it,” said driver Ian Welford. “She was lovely. You could talk to her like a normal person.”

They pressed her on an EU safety training course which the drivers have to sit through every five years. “France, Germany and Spain all opted out, but the good old UK, because we do everything we’re told, we took it on and gold-plated it,” said Peter Shepherd.

Mrs May explained how, post-Brexit, the British government could look at dismantling such legislation.

“She were proper nice, but smaller than I thought,” said driver Adrian Morrell.

The other truckers, like their boss, were confirmed Conservatives, but Mr Morrell said: “I have always been a Labour voter, but now I will vote Conservative. If it had been Cameron, no, but you can tell she’s strong, she will try and do it.

“And Jeremy Corbyn, what can I say? You can’t call him a leader – where’s all his money coming from to nationalise the railways and everything?”

The election is as much about Labour’s perceived weakness as it is about Mrs May’s well-used clichés about her “strong and stable leadership”, and the signs are now that she is certainly getting a warmer reception in the North-East than she did in Tow Law 25 years ago.