Tom Peck's Sketch: Cameron promises a 'new raft of homeowners', then heads off to Cumbria to meet it.

Credit where it’s due. It was barely noon when the Prime Minister promised to create “a new raft of homeowners” and by mid afternoon there it was paddling up the street in front of him.

He had stopped in Burton-on-Trent only to re-re-re-announce a new shared home ownership scheme and to talk some big talk about a “zero tolerance of mediocrity”, before zipping up to the Northern Powerhouse, which remains largely without power, to explain how a series of flood defences installed in 2012 were not in fact designed to defend against flood.

“Some levels of flooding cannot be defended against,” Mr Cameron protested, taking full ownership of the kind of line more frequently uttered by a 22 year old recruitment consultant with a fist-sized tie knot and Jamie Oliver haircut, and which more frequently ends with the indignity of staring down the barrel of Lord Sugar’s suddenly protuberant index finger.

In some parts of the Northern no-Powerhouse, he said, you’d now be able to buy a home “with a deposit of £1,400.” Ownership would then be shared between the buyer and three feet of the nearby river.

On a day that began with Cobra and ended in flooded Cumbria, the Prime Minister must have been tempted to cancel his twenty minute stop at the De Ferrers Academy. In fact It was generous of him not to upset the four pupils for whom the hundred or so teachers, governors and local councillors had generously made room in the assembly hall.

It was, Mr Cameron told them, “an excellent school”, from where the pupils leave and go on to “apprenticeships, university places, good jobs.”

The cabbie who drove me there from the station, himself a former pupil, had gone further. “It is the best school in the whole of Staffordshire,” he claimed, and bore out both his and the Prime Minister’s sentiment by only getting lost once.

And Mr Cameron was clearly thinking of his teenage audience cruelly locked outside when he kept the speech’s solitary highlight down to an easily shareable / tweetable / instagrammable / whatsappable 1.5 seconds, repeating the words if not the accent of Leytonstone station’s suddenly famous off-camera bystander. “You Ain’t No Muslim Bruv,” the Prime Minister pronounced, with an entirely straight face. “He said it better than I could.” It was, by this point, five minutes since he had stood on stage in a school and pronounced the end of mediocrity.

Two minutes later, he was back in the Prime Ministerial jag, and heading north. A pity.

Rail visitors to this part of the country change trains in historic Tamworth, the town from which Robert Peel launched the modern Conservative party in 1834, and from which the succulent but vulnerable Tamworth pig takes it name - two facts that until very recently had little to conjoin them.