Lib Dems to target more seats at the general election

Anna Gross writes in the Financial Times:

The Liberal Democrat party is stepping up campaigning in more than a dozen seats predominantly in the south of England following recent by-election wins, as it starts to broaden its ambitions ahead of the general election expected next year.

Dave McCobb, the director of field campaigns, presented a paper to members on Tuesday night that identified areas where support for the Lib Dems was growing, giving the party a good chance of pushing out the Conservatives at the next election.

Most of these constituencies are in the party’s former heartland in the south-west of England, including Taunton Deane and West Dorset, as well in Surrey in the south-east and the seat of Stratford-on-Avon in the West Midlands.

As someone who was at the meeting has told the FT, some of these seats were not thought to be winnable even a few months ago. Certainly, the three that Gross mentions here have not been much discussed in the media.

The worry, as ever, is that we will become too ambitious, spread our resources too thinly and suffer a series of narrow defeats. But this optimism seems better founded than that which fuelled the our 2019 campaign, which was based on wishful thinking and some unlikely opinion poll findings.