One of this blog's established roles is engendering irrational optimism in its Liberal Democrat readers.
So I was naturally drawn to a piece of research by Luke Jeffrey that suggests some Conservative seats in the South of England may be vulnerable to the Lib Dems.
Jeffrey looks at this month's local election results in 82 Tory seats across Gloucestershire, Wiltshire, Oxfordshire, Hampshire, Surrey, West Sussex, East Sussex, Kent, Hertfordshire and Cambridgeshire.
He finds that the Lib Dems outpolled the Tories in seven of them: Winchester, Eastleigh, Eastbourne, Chippenham, Cheltenham, Watford, and South Cambridgeshire.
Across these 82 seats, the Lib Dems obtained 24.1 per cent of the vote, up 4.2 per cent on the 2019 general election.
There are, of course, lots of caveats to be entered, and Jeffrey enters all of them, but we must take our hope where we can get it.
The idea of a Blue Wall that may crumble will appeal to the media and a Lib Dem victory in Chesham and Amersham will give that idea more credibility.
And that will gives the Tory government a headache as it is faced with defending its gains in the Red Wall while keeping its traditional voters in the Blue Wall happy.
Particularly as there is nothing in Boris Johnson's journalistic or political career to suggest that be believes in levelling up anything.
2 comments:
And there are a lot of policy issues to get stuck into: planning regs; farming and animal welfare versus the Australian FTA. Would like to see the LDs making the weather for a change. Plenty of liberal wing Tory votes up for grabs.
How fitting that we should be approaching the May 26th anniversary of Arsenal's famous title-winning victory against Liverpool in 1989. Brian Moore's immortal words 'It's up for grabs now!' as Michael Thomas surged towards the Liverpool goal couldn't be more apt.
It's up for grabs across Southern England.
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