thetorydiary

Eric Pickles has just issued a statement describing the Liberal Democrat conference as "muddled".  That's very generous from the Tory Chairman.  It's been a pretty bad week for Britain's third party.

The party that has carefully presented itself as the reasonable party for many years became nasty. Saturday's attacks on David Cameron and George Osborne were just a curtain-raiser for Chris Huhne's portrayal of William Hague as a skinhead. Clegg was still in attack mode in his closing speech - a speech pushed down the running order on news bulletins by Obama's I-love-the-United-Nations speech.

Vince Cable's inflated reputation has also suffered a knock. His tax on high value properties won't help his party cling on to seats like Richmond-upon-Thames and Winchester. We also learnt that key members of Clegg's "shadow cabinet" (not that it is a real "shadow cabinet") weren't briefed on the policy. Don't they trust each other, these LibDems?

Clegg's authority took a number of hits. Former leader Charles Kennedy rebelled against the leader's desire to scrap the unaffordable policy of scrapping tuition fees and Steve Webb MP rebelled against the suggestion that child benefit might be means-tested.  There were murmurings throughout Conference at Nick Clegg's threat of "savage" cuts. Graeme Archer's verdict on Mr Clegg is worth republishing:

"Nick 'Savage Cuts' Clegg put on his ill-fitting guise of the Angry Young Man of British Politics, in a determined effort to sound stentorian. I imagine him lying in bed, in the early hours, gazing at the ceiling, and dreaming, in that between-sleep-and-wakefulness moment, of the conversations to be overheard at the Dog and Duck: That Nick Clegg! 'E tells it 'ow it is! I'm gonna vote for 'im! Perhaps he sees himself as Elizabeth I? Manning-up in order to deliver the message that his party - let alone the electorate - doesn't want to hear? We will savagely scrap our free tuition policy! he - well, not announced, more sort of tangentially 'let it be known' - only to retract the (non)commitment when the massed ranks of something called the Federal Policy Committee responded with that most lethal of Lib Dem weapons, a letter to the Guardian."

Danny Finkelstein is right in today's Times that the LibDems have a big opportunity in the next parliament. Any Tory government will be overseeing unpopular budget measures and Labour may be imploding. But the LibDems currently lack any strategic sense. Are they a left-wing party committed to taxing the rich and protecting public services or are they the party of "savage" cuts in public spending?  A survey of their activists suggests a big split on whether they should move leftwards or rightwards.  On Europe they remain a party out-of-sync with increasing Euroscepticism in many of their heartland areas, notably south west England.

In Brown and Clegg, Cameron is very lucky in the quality of his opponents.

Tim Montgomerie

The Times reports today that "the Liberal Democrats are to focus their general election campaign on Labour seats in an historic shift that could help David Cameron."

Their leader, Nick Clegg has written this piece in the paper in which he makes the somewhat implausible claim that the "real choice" at the next election will be "between yellow and blue".

It all coincides with the publication by Demos of a 92-page volume by Clegg called The Liberal Moment (which you can download here here should you be interested),

But I got a sense of déjà vu when reading about this targeting of Labour seats: indeed, back in July 2008 (when I was still at the Telegraph) I wrote this blog post about how Clegg had instructed the party to "step up our campaigns in the 50 seats where we’re best placed to beat Labour".

I suspect that they will win some of the Labour seats on their target list (and I listed the top 50 in that blog post last summer), but I'm not convinced that there will be that many: their position on Iraq marked them out from the other two parties at the last election, leading them to the high water mark they reached - but Iraq will not be an issue next year and it is hard to see which message they could put out which would resonate with voters in the same way.

Furthermore, the forthcoming general election is far more likely than the last two to end up with the third party being squeezed as the country faces a fundamental choice between Labour and the Conservatives as to who should form the Government.

So whatever, Clegg has written, I don't think Tory candidates in Lib Dem seats should be thinking their task has somehow got easier overnight as I sense that the Lib Dems' first priority is still going to have to be to defend the seats they already have - most of which feature the Conservatives as their principle principal challengers, as the Times's Sam Coates points out in this commentary this morning.

But that said, as I have blogged before here, there is every reason to believe that with a lot of hard work, those Lib Dem held seats are attainable:

"One of the key arguments which I expect Tory candidates to be deploying in those Lib Dem-held seats will be that if you want to turf out this Labour Government, the only alternative administration on offer is a Conservative one. In other words, voting for the sitting Lib Dem MP rather than the Conservative candidate will only serve to lessen the chances of a new Government being formed by David Cameron. (And remember, many of those who have been voting Lib Dem in those seats for the last decade are former Tory voters who deserted the party in 1997, but who would surely find the prospect of Prime Minister Cameron an attractive one)"

> Peter Franklin recently considered in this CentreRight post the Labour/Lib Dem battle on the Centre-Left.

Jonathan Isaby

Lord Rennard, the big brain behind Liberal Democrat campaigning for many-a-year, ends his career on a low note.  The Tories think they got the better of him at the Henley by-election and they are now delighted that Liberal Democrats are being beaten by Conservatives in Cornwall, Devon, Somerset and North Yorkshire.  Yesterday's results put in to question Nick Clegg's ambition to fight Labour in the north and in urban Britain.  With their south western heartland and rural seats so vulnerable can he divert scarce resources to expansionary campaigning?

During my time in CCHQ yesterday there were many shouts for joy.  Winning control of the Red Rose County of Lancashire was probably the top moment but the victories over the LibDems brought the deepest satisfaction.

Westminster insiders agree that Liberal Democrats had the worst night in terms of relative performance.  PoliticsHome has just published the county council results against the benchmarks set by its polling of one hundred Westminster insiders.  Although Labour did "worse than expected" the Liberal Democrats did "much worse than expected" by the journalists, politicians and other insiders that make up the PoliticsHomeIndex:

The rise of the Greens was a contributory problem for the Liberal Democrats but CCHQ put the Tory success down to two main factors:

• The overhaul of the Tory election machine, overseen by Stephen Gilbert and Eric Pickles.
• The whole Cameron strategy of ensuring the party talks about the environment, civil liberties and social justice as well as the so-called core vote issues.  In today's FT Robert Shrimsley argues that David Cameron has returned Conservatism to the more moderate state that existed before Margaret Thatcher.  It appears to be working electorally.  Time will tell if it's what the country needs.

Tim Montgomerie

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