Benjamin Netanyahu bookeneded the last crucial week of campaigning with trips to London and the Russian Black Sea resort of Sochi, meeting Boris Johnson and Vladimir Putin.

In between, Mr Netanyahu spent a tumultuous week rummaging through his bag of well-tried election tricks as he fought to boost the right-wing turnout in the hope of confounding the polls once again.

On Thursday night, when Mr Netanyahu was due to land back in Israel from Sochi, the pollsters were making their last calculations before a pre-election purdah.

This has been a rather boring election for them: the polls have barely moved. Right wing and religious parties are predicted to take around 65 seats while the centre-left is on about 55. Just like in April.

And again, Avigdor Lieberman is set to refuse a coalition with the Strictly Orthodox parties, essentially blocking Mr Netanyahu’s path to forming a government.

The main difference this time is that Mr Lieberman’s Yisrael Beitenu party has actually added seats in the polls, largely at Likud’s expense, making him even more of an obstacle.

The deadlock caused by 2019’s first election could well be continue on Tuesday night, if the polls are borne out and neither Mr Netanyahu nor his challenger, Blue & White leader Benny Gantz, has a majority. Mr Lieberman will be kingmaker.

The meeting with Mr Johnson in Downing Street was not the main reason for Mr Netanyahu’s London visit. He had come to speak with the new American Defence Secretary Mark Esper.

On the agenda was Iran and more specifically, Mr Netanyahu’s entreaties to the Trump administration not to go all-in with a new diplomatic engagement.

The outcome was unsatisfactory: Mr Esper later told reporters that a meeting between Donald Trump and Iranian President Hassan Rouhani was on the cards. This was to be followed in the next days from similar remarks from Mr Trump himself.

Iran has been a centerpiece of every Netanyahu campaign. Back in the 2015 election he described the Iranian nuclear threat as “life itself”, rubbishing the figures on rising housing prices he had been confronted with.

This week alone, Iran was the centre of two televised Netanyahu statements. The first, on Monday, was billed a “special” statement in which he presented what he claimed was footage of a secret Iranian weapons development centre. But it failed to cause much of a stir.

Then on Tuesday, there was a “dramatic” statement to which all the Likud leadership was invited.

This time, a premature missive from the leader of the Jordan Valley regional council stole his thunder, but he still went ahead with the grand reveal of his promise to extend Israeli sovereignty to the Jordan Valley — if re-elected, that is.

But this statement was not the bombshell he had hoped.

Rival right-wing leaders quickly reminded him he had made similar promises in April too. In reality, Israel has not acted to annex any part of the West Bank in Mr Netanyahu’s entire thirteen years in office.

Yet the news that night was dominated instead by John Bolton, the US national security advisor, one of Israel’s closest allies in the White House and leading hawk on Iran.

He was fired by Mr Trump in a clear sign that the president hopes to meet his Iranian opposite number.

And there was worse to come for Mr Netanyahu. An hour later, during an election rally in Ashdod, a salvo of rockets was launched from Gaza, leading to the embarrassing picture of the prime minister hastily being bundled off-stage by his bodyguards.

With Iran and annexation used up, Mr Netanyahu fell back on another old tactic, attacking Israel’s Arab minority.

But at a hastily convened Knesset session on Wednesday morning, Likud could not find the necessary votes to pass its “cameras law”, which would allow party representatives to bring recording devices into polling stations.

This was part of Mr Netanyahu’s campaign of accusing the Arabs and the left-wing of trying to “steal the election result”. It fizzled out in the Knesset amid angry scenes of Arab Joint List leader, Ayman Odeh, shoving a camera-phone in the prime minister’s face.

Iran, annexation, Arabs and high-profile meetings with world leaders — the last week of campaigning has had it all.

The election is now down largely to logistics as the parties gear up to get out the vote. Mr Netanyahu has done all he can to try and motivate right-wingers on Tuesday and eke out a majority.