Lord Bonkers' Diary: A warning to Labour after Stoke

See? Razor-sharp analysis. The old boy is not such a buffer as some suppose. 

Friday

Home from Stoke-on-Trent where I have been helping in the by-election. I have nothing against the good people of Copeland, but a chap doesn’t want to glow in the dark, what?

Besides, I had promised Cook I would buy a replacement pie dish for the Wedgwood one that good broken on the night we celebrated Sarah Olney’s victory in the Richmond Park by-election.

I am afraid that Ukip’s candidate was something of a dud: no one believed his claims to have been the first Briton in space (as every schoolboy used to know, it was Raymond Baxter). Let me, however, give the Labour Party the benefit of my long experience.

I recall we Liberal Democrats got terribly excited when we held Eastleigh after poor Huhne was dragged off to Dartmoor. Yet, as I pointed out at the time, the Tories and Ukippers helpfully split the reactionary vote between them. Not only that: the Tory candidate was so bad that she was sent off to Patagonia halfway through the campaign.

I was saddened, but not surprised, when we lost the seat at the following general election. The parallels with the result in Stoke-on-Trent are all too clear.

Lord Bonkers was Liberal MP for Rutland South West, 1906-10.

Previously in Lord Bonkers' Diary...

• Staring back at Theresa May
• Donald Trump was born in Stornoway
• Jeremy Corbyn was recruited by the Conservatives at prep school
• Hand-in-hand with Hitler

Liberal Democrats are right to fight Oldham West and Royton hard

During the Coalition years it was taken for granted by the Liberal Democrats that it was not worth our putting up a serious fight in parliamentary by-elections. Better to concentrate of our resources on seats already held by the party (or being fought by candidates who had written complimentary biographies of the party's leader).

That view, thank goodness, no longer holds sway. At Oldham West and Royton the Liberal Democrats are running their first major by-election campaign since Eastleigh, says Richard Kemp:

When I went there I spent precisely 3 minutes in the HQ. I hadn’t gone there to chat I had gone there to work. The excellent staff turned us round quickly with 3 bundles of leaflets and some hillsides to climb to deliver them in! But in even in that brief period I met 6 people I know well – some of whom I have known for decades. 

Even as Kris and I trudged out we were hugely aware that we were part of a national party coming together to deliver a result. We saw another delivery team on an adjacent patch. We got up the nose of 4 Labour deliverers who thought they had a divine right to rule. 

We knew that inside the HQ other people were hitting the telephone canvass lines. That yet further people were preparing the next leaflet; send out telephone canvassing instruction, preparing for the next day. We knew we were contributing to and playing our part in an event which is important for our Lib Dem family.

Meanwhile, Caron Lindsay points to two further reasons for going to Oldham, beyond feeling this Lib Dem buzz: you will come across ideas that will help your local campaign and you will be dragged from your comfort zone.

It is possible to overdo the 'Lib Dem family' schtick: we are a political party and political parties exist to win and exercise power.

But Towards Gunfire is right to say:

Whilst we are unlikely to win the Oldham West and Royton by-election, we must fight it as though it were a target constituency and make sure that we put in the financial and human resource that this approach implies. 

How we perform in this by-election matters more than people think. 

We must take this early opportunity to demonstrate our ability to bounce back from a crushing general election result and remind the electorate that we still exist. It's an opportunity to experiment with our new 'core' campaign messages and take on board any learning that arises from that.

So listen to the ALDC when it tells you how to get involved:

Jane Brophy, ALDC member and Councillor in Trafford, is the candidate for the Lib Dems and is an absolutely fantastic campaigner. 

If you are interested in seeing the buzz for yourself, please come to Oldham. 

Our campaign HQ is at 51 Union Street, Oldham OL1 1HH and is less than 2 minutes walk from the nearby tram stop. 

Alternatively you can make calls from home. Just drop the campaign a line on jane4oldhamwr@gmail.com and the team will be sure to get you fully briefed and raring to go.

The Liberal Democrats made too much of the Eastleigh by-election

Liberal Democrat activists have remained remarkably cheerful despite our abysmal national opinion poll ratings and our failure to score even one per cent of the vote at the Rochester and Strood by-election in November.

The chief reason for this may be an earlier by-election in this parliament, Eastleigh, which we held in defiance of many predictions.

But I wonder if we did not make too much of Eastleigh. For the Liberal Democrat vote fell substantially - Mike Thornton received 32.1 per cent, against the 46.5 per cent Chris Huhne recorded at the 2010 general election.

The reason we held the seat despite this decline was that the Conservatives and Ukip split the anti Lib Dem vote almost evenly.

And we aided both by a spectacularly bad Conservative candidate and an inept campaign. Having chosen a right-wing headbanger to carry the Tory flag, their campaign slogan appeared to be:

"Ukip are right about everything but you mustn't vote for them."

Nor I am convinced that holding the seat despite our previous MP being jailed was such an achievement. I doubt that the thought of asking someone else to take your speeding points is particularly shocking to many votes - a theory that early coverage of the by-election rather supported.

Indeed, while I have been told many times over the years that Chris Huhne is unpopular with lots of Lib Dem activists, I have never come across any evidence to support this idea.

The reality was that he was a popular MP, the Liberal Democrat council was exceptionally well run, the constituency party was large and active, and that the national party put in an extraordinary effort.

Add all these factors together and it does not seem such a surprise that we held Eastleigh.

There are reasons for Liberal Democrats to be cheerful, notably the constituency polls that Lord Ashcroft published in the autumn of last year. Many of these show both the Liberal Democrat and Conservative votes declining and us holding on surprisingly easily in some seats,

And I am not worried that Nick Clegg will lose Sheffield Hallam. This is not so much that I believe Nick is immensely popular as because I cannot picture Labour winning a prosperous suburban seat like this.

But I think we may have been guilty, quite understandably given the avalanche of bad news over the past years, of making more of the Eastleigh by-election than it warrants.

My Leicester Mercury column on the Lib Dem Conference

My latest column for the Leicester Mercury. As ever in such pieces, I am poised uneasily between being a partisan and an analyst

We're enjoying power for as long as we can 

Watching the coverage of the Liberal Democrat Conference in Glasgow I am struck by how cheerful everyone looks.

By rights, they shouldn’t be. At the last general election the Lib Dems polled 22 per cent of the vote: the last poll I saw had us on 7 per cent. 

Why this strange happiness? I can think of three reasons.

First, we are rather enjoying being in government. Despite coming to power at a horribly difficult time, the Coalition has solid achievements to its credit: getting more people to enrol in occupational pension schemes, tax cuts for the low paid, more money for schools to help poor pupils.

The striking thing about this list is that all three measures were in the 2010 Liberal Democrat manifesto. Meanwhile, it is the Conservative Party that has started to splinter under the pressure of government. The Lib Dems have remained boringly united.

Just as the Lib Dems prove rather good at running councils when they take power, they have proved to be good ministers at Westminster. Why shouldn’t the party enjoy this for as long as possible? 

Second, no one joined the Liberal Democrats for an easy life. Fighting against the odds is business as usual as far as we are concerned. Perhaps there are those in the party who look forward to the purity and safety of opposition again, but a difficult general election does not scare us.

Third, there is a surprising amount of optimism around in Lib Dem circles. Ever since the Eastleigh by-election, which we won even though the previous Lib Dem MP for the seat was behind bars, there has been a feeling that, whatever the opinion polls say, our MPs will hold their seats.

The truth is probably somewhere in between, with the Lib Dems doing better than the polls (and a lot of commentators) suggest but not as well as their more optimistic activists hope.

But what happens after next year’s general election?

It may be that the Lib Dems will find themselves part of a coalition government again, but what if we are out of government?

I shall not regret a moment of the party being in government, but there will be a need to rebuild the party’s base on local councils and convince people again that we stand up for the poor and powerless.
While we have been in government, that standing up has been done behind closed doors by blocking the nastier Conservative ideas.

Soon it may be time for the Lib Dems to take off their suits and wear their beards and sandals again.

Crisis? What crisis? My Leicester Mercury column on the Liberal Democrats

This is my surprisingly loyalist 'First person' column in today's Leicester Mercury.

Three years in and the Lib Dems are doing okay

Crisis? What crisis? When I joined the Liberal Party in the late 1970s we were finishing behind the National Front in parliamentary by-elections and our former leader was about to go on trial at the Old Bailey for conspiracy to murder. That’s a crisis.

The Liberal Democrats at their Conference in Glasgow this week has been wrestling with a very different problem.

Our rickety electoral system managed to produce the correct result at the 2010 general election. The voters wanted to get rid Gordon Brown and Labour, but didn’t wholly trust David Cameron and the Conservatives. So a Tory – Liberal Democrat coalition was about the right outcome.

The Liberal Democrats were left to answer a new question for Westminster politics: how does the junior partner in a coalition maintain its identity while acting as a responsible party of government?

We have not got everything right, but we have made a pretty good job of it. The Lib Dems have been unshakeable in their commitment to cutting spending to put right the mess that Labour left us. When a pretty mild alternative was put forward at the Conference, it was voted down.

The Coalition has helped businesses create over a million new private sector jobs and 1.2 million apprenticeships have started, some with financial support from the government. Best of all, we are giving a £700 tax cut to 24 million people by making sure nobody pay any income tax on the first £10,000 they earn.

That tax cut was in the Liberal Democrat manifesto. David Cameron said it couldn’t be done, but we made him do it.

Not that I always agree with Nick Clegg. I was pleased to see the Lib Dem Conference vote against the ‘bedroom tax’ this week and pleased to see many of our MPs refuse to support military strikes on Syria. This coalition business is difficult and Nick and his party are still learning.

But, I hear you ask, aren’t the Liberal Democrats doomed? Just look at the opinion polls!

We Lib Dems are used to doing badly in mid-term polls and we hold many of our seats because we are strong local campaigners. You can look at Eastleigh, where we held the by-election that followed Chris Huhne’s resignation, but there are good examples nearer to home.

In this year’s county elections the Liberal Democrats scored their best ever result in Hinckley & Bosworth, held all their seats in Oadby & Wigston and polled more votes than any other party across the Harborough constituency.

Coalition is not easy, but the Liberal Democrats are alive and kicking.

Jonathan Calder is a former Liberal councillor in Harborough and blogs at Liberal England.

More evidence that Lib Dem MPs can beat the opinion polls

It has been common, at least since Mike Thornton won the Eastleigh by-election, for Liberal Democrats to argue that those who say we will be all but wiped out at the next general election are mistaken. Never mind the opinion polls, our MPs are popular and good campaigners, so they have a sporting chance of keeping their seats.

More evidence for this view comes from the October issue of Total Politics.

The magazine asked the members of YouGov's online panel about their satisfaction with their own MP. The results were startling:

if you’re a Conservative and you have a Labour MP, you can be forgiven for being predisposed to being dissatisfied with what they’re doing, and vice versa. 

But Lib Dem MPs appear to be able to reach across that divide. Even among non-Lib Dem voters, Lib Dem MPs scored +7. Amongst Lib Dem-voting respondents who had a Lib Dem MP, the score was an astonishing +61. 

We need to be cautious here: once you cut the data in a normal-sized survey down to focus just on Lib Dem voters (of whom there are currently not many) and who have Lib Dem MPs (of whom there are even fewer), you’re soon down to very small numbers of respondents and large margins of error. 

Still, while all MPs do better among those who will vote for that party than those who won’t, Lib Dems appear to be able to connect with non-supporters in a way that neither Labour nor Conservative MPs can.

The poll also found that

the views of those who've contacted their local MP about that MP are almost entirely dependent on how satisfactory the contact was. This relationship holds true regardless of the party leanings of the constituent.

Lord Bonkers' Diary: “I Made Eastleigh Happen”

The new issue of Liberator is with subscribers, or at least on its way, so it is time to spend another week at the demi-paradise that is Bonkers Hall in Rutland.

Monday

A package arrives in the post. I find it to contain a rather stylish badge, which I consider wearing while I go about my business on the old demesne. Then I read what it says – “I Made Eastleigh Happen” – and ring for my secretary.

“Could you forward this to Dartmoor or Wormwood Scrubs or wherever the poor fellow is at the moment?” I ask him. “It was obviously meant for Huhne.”

Lord Bonkers was Liberal MP for Rutland South-West 1906-10.

"Now we can sit back and watch the Tories go mad" - an apology

When the Liberal Democrats won the Eastleigh by-election in the small hours of 1 March, I got rather carried away on Twitter:

Congratulations to @mike4eastleigh - now we can sit back and watch the Tories go mad #libdemandproud
— Jonathan Calder (@lordbonkers) March 1, 2013

Later that morning I was quoted on the Today programme as a "prominent Liberal Democrat blogger".

But I was wrong. In the aftermath of Eastleigh the Conservatives kept their nerve and behaved sensibly.

Two months later, however, following UKIP's performance in the local elections, they have indeed gone completely hatstand.

Six of the Best 331

A Scottish Liberal reminds us that the leadership of the Scottish Liberal Democrats will be defending secret courts at the party's conference next week: "Will they, like Nick Clegg, avoid the real issues and reinforce the members' anger? Will it become increasingly obvious that a chasm is opening between grassroots activists and parliamentarians that is both destructive and unnecessary? Or will they succeed in convincing the members that they are listening, respectful and receptive - even if they take a different view on the policy detail?"

Eastleigh signals the beginning of the end for Nick Clegg not the end of the beginning, says Living on Words Alone.

There is not much left of Liam Fox by the time Alex Massie has finished with him.

"It is hard to see how journalists will ever again earn an enviable wage," says Tom Streithorst on Prospect Blog.

Helen O'Neil writes of John Stuart Mill's involvement with the London Library its blog.

"Liverpool St Station was opened in 1874 and survived largely unchanged into the nineteen seventies. So, in 1977, when proposals to redevelop the station were suggested, I decided to spend some time there, documenting the life of the station with its astonishing brick and iron architecture. I loved the cleaners, taking a break, and the young lad taking it upon himself to reschedule the next train." Tony Bock introduces his photographs on Spitalfields Life.

My fourth Whipped column for Ad Lib

Here is my latest column from the new Liberal Democrat magazine Ad Lib.

It seems I never got round to posting the third Whipped here, but the interesting question is whether I shall manage a fifth one when there is nothing to laugh about in our MPs being whipped to vote for secret courts.

Whipped: From the desk of the Junior Whip

“Do you want to find out how politics really works?” asked the Chief Whip.

“Oh yes,” I replied. “That’s just what I hoped for when I got this job.”

“There’s a train to Eastleigh leaving Waterloo in 30 minutes. Be on it.”

I am writing this under the end of a hedge near Hedge End. My shoes are holed, my hands are black with ink and a Jack Russell has eaten my last canvass card.

Yet I was happy to get away. A resignation and a censuring: it was too much for me. (And if you haven’t been censured by a Scotsman, you never been censured.)

It got worse. The Chief Whip was determined the Tories would lose their vote on constituency boundaries. He even called in Jenny Willott, who was four days from giving birth. He had me standing by with plenty of hot water and Wikipedia. “You’ve seen Call the Midwife, laddie. How hard can it be?”

Now I wish I had stayed in Westminster. The only mercy is that we went for a short campaign – the Chief Whip did not want the Tories to have months to throw money at the seat. Having met their candidate, I wonder if he was right. The more the public see of her, the better we shall do.

So I know how politics really works – and I don’t like it. I never want to see another by-election, and if I become an MP I shall apply for the Chiltern Hundreds. And keep them.

Because I like the idea of being Crown Steward and Bailiff of Stoke, Desborough and Burnham. I fancy a life pottering around collecting the rents from trim brick and flint farmhouses set among beech woods, rolling chalk hills and steep- valleys.

But I must stop now. That Jack Russell has just sniffed me out.

David Cameron adopts George W. Bush's tactics

I can't find a source for this theory - can you help? - but I recall that George W. Bush's campaign tactics revolved around his remain the "aw gee shucks" nice guy while everyone else on his team poured vitriol over the opposition.

David Cameron seems to be trying something similar.

In the aftermath of his party's defeat at Eastleigh, Cameron announced there would be no "lurch to the right". Yet ever since we have seen his ministers doing just that.

Withdrawal from the European Convention on Human Rights. An identity card before you can use the National Health Service. Further cuts in the welfare budget.

I suspect that Cameron's reasoning is that he will play the moderate to keep more liberal voters board - after all, we have an increasingly presidential system at general elections - while the rest of the Conservatives ensure the faithful that really there is nothing he enjoys more than kicking foreigners.

Labour was the big loser in Eastleigh

The Eastleigh by-election leaves things much where they were.

By this I mean that the frontier between Conservative and Liberal Democrat voters remains much where it has been since 1997. Some seats did change hands between the two parties in both directions, but that may have had more to do with the expenses scandal than anything else.

This suggests that the claim from Tim Farron that the Liberal Democrats could gain 30 seats from the Conservatives is overly optimistic, but it is certainly no more ridiculous than the widespread idea that the Liberal Democrats will be wiped out at the next election.

The Conservatives will have to ask themselves how they ended up with a candidate they had first to hide from the press and eventually ban from speaking to them at all. One explanation is that the wider Conservative organisation, for so long the party's strength, is now its weakness. Conservative members no longer represent prosperous society but are a strange subset of the angry and obsessed. These, after all, are the people who chose Iain Duncan Smith as party leader.

Whatever the truth of that, Maria Hutchings did confirm the observation that people described as "no nonsense" are usually full of it.

UKIP did well, but I suspect Nigel Farage's boast that they drew their support from across the other parties is a problem for them. Yes, they probably did attract the protest vote element of Liberal Democrat support, the anti-immigrant working class from Labour and the fruitcake wing of the Conservative Party, but that coalition may be hard to put together in other seats.

I would not go so far as John Rentoul who talks about "the paradox of Eastleigh":

It looked like a stunning success for Ukip but it was a grand failure. If Ukip had won the seat, Cameron might have had a terminal problem. But, despite Farage cheeking his establishment rivals, his party attracted just 28 per cent of the vote. If Ukip cannot win a protest by-election in Hampshire, with the coalition parties splitting their vote, and the economy becalmed, it is unlikely that it can win anywhere.

because I think the party might do better in a longer campaign in a safe Conservative seat where it could emerge as the main challenger - Alun Wyburn-Powell may not agree with me.

But the clearest message from Eastleigh is that it was a bad result for Labour. In the 1994 by-election the party came second: this time it came fourth with no increase in its vote over the 2012 general election.

Don't take my word for it: read George Eaton in the New Statesman on 13 February. He began by saying:

Labour's decision to select John O'Farrell as its candidate in the Eastleigh by-election is being hailed by many commentators as a game-changer.

he concluded:

having declared itself to be the party of "one nation" and having vowed to win over voters in the south, Labour has no choice but to campaign hard. Were it to finish in fourth place behind UKIP, as one poll suggested was possible, it would be a disastrous result for Ed Miliband.

"Disastrous" may be too strong, but the Eastleigh result does suggest Labour has won back no ground in the South of England since the last general election.

On being a prominent Liberal Democrat blogger

This morning at 8:10 the BBC Radio 4 Today programme quoted a "prominent Liberal Democrat blogger" as saying "now we can sit back and watch the Tories go mad".

That blogger was me. Having gone against my better judgement and stayed up for the Eastleigh result I tweeted this:

Congratulations to @mike4eastleigh - now we can sit back and watch the Tories go mad #libdemandproud
— Jonathan Calder (@lordbonkers) March 1, 2013

Being awake at that hour, I was also able to spot a certain Mr G. Mulholland of Leeds becoming my 3000th follower on Twitter.

Which means I must now beware the onset of a syndrome first identified by Grace Dent:

50. I believe 3,000 followers is the point at which lots of tweeters start behaving like utter maniacs. "3,000 follower syndrome" is a worrying medical condition. 

51. The first sign of "3,000 follower syndrome" is apologising for not checking in on Twitter until later than usual, believing that Twitter must have felt so empty without you. 

52. The second sign is placing tweets in your timeline answering the question you say "everyone" is asking you. If you check this person's @ column it almost invariably turns out no one is speaking to them. 

53. It gets even worse after that.

Thinking about it, this post may be the first symptom.

Headline of the Day

Well done, LabourList:

Why Labour probably won’t win in Eastleigh

A Conservative press officer reacts to Maria Hutchings

Found on Twitter via @OllyGrender and @BelindaBG.

UKIP MEP Marta Andreasen switches to the Conservatives

From ITV News:

"Our party is the only one on the up," the UKIP leader Nigel Farage told our cameras in Eastleigh today. 

And yet by the end of the day, UKIP was absorbing the news that one of its most prominent MEPs had defected to the Conservatives 

Marta Andreasen is not a name well known to those outside Westminster or Brussels. But if you were to name a UKIP member other than Mr Farage - she might be the one you would choose. 

It reinforces UKIP's main problem: that the party is nothing without Nigel Farage.

Why Maria Hutchings missed the BBC Eastleigh hustings

The Conservatives' deeply unimpressive campaign in the Eastleigh by-election continued in its accustomed style today as their candidate, Maria Hutchings, failed to attend a hustings organised and broadcast by BBC Radio Five Live.

Her excuse, as Michael Deacon reminds us in the Daily Telegraph, was that she had to accompany David Cameron on a visit to the Prysmian Cables & Systems factory in the town.

Cameron, says Deacon, said that she simply hadn’t had time to take part in the hustings because of the factory visit.

But it seems that the same journalists from the BBC had no trouble in reporting both events.

Maria Hutchings herself said she had to come to the factory early to "prepare and come and speak to the people at this business".

So guess how long her speech at Prysmian Cables & Systems lasted.

One minute, 57 seconds.

Eastleigh by-election latest: Tories take steps to hide candidate from media

Don't be beastly. Go to Eastleigh

Six of the Best 322

A View from Ham Common is surprised by the Conservatives' choice of candidate for the Eastleigh by-election: "surely the Tories best chance of winning in Eastleigh is to win over disaffected Lib Dems. Maria Hutchings, I would suggest, is  more likely to send them the other way."

But maybe he shouldn't be. Mark Thompson shows that the Tory intake of 2010 is less liberal socially than their MPs who were elected in 2005.

Simon McKay on the legality and morality of police officers using the identities of dead children to conduct undercover operations.

Nearly half of all US farms now have superweeds, reports Mother Jones.

""What have you done, what have you done," Boycott muttered as it dawned on him he was out. Botham's response - allegedly, "I've run you out, you ****" - has gone down in folklore." On ESPN Cricinfo, Martin Williamson remembers the day when a young Ian Botham was given orders to run out his captain to help England win a test match.

IanVisits takes us into the vast undercroft beneath the Albert Mermorial.