Liberal democrats

The Liberal Democrat resilience in countless marginal seats has confounded many commentators. While perhaps winning half the number of votes as Ukip nationwide, it is far from inconceivable that they will win five to ten times the number of seats. Take Sutton & Cheam, for instance, where despite having a majority of just 1,608 votes, Paul Berstow seems all but certain to retain his seat. This has, quite correctly, been attributed to the personal following of Lib Dem incumbents – and their ability to build an often robust local campaigning machine around their cult of personality. People of all sides of the political spectrum flock to banners, irrespective of their underlying party

After Nick Clegg enjoyed a night out at the pub earlier this month, it only seems fair that his wife Miriam González Durántez should also be allowed to let off some steam. So Mr S was glad to see that she was a guest at last night’s WIE (Women: Inspiration & Enterprise) Awards Gala at Goldsmiths’ Hall. Conscious that her decision to attend a glitzy bash so close to polling day might raise eyebrows, Miriam explained in her speech that she was breaking election etiquette and that Clegg’s political advisors would prefer her to be at home: ‘Unfortunately General Elections are not seen by political advisers as good times for wives of political leaders

For someone who might be about to lose her seat, Jo Swinson seems very perky as she walks the streets of Bishopbriggs in her constituency. The Lib Dem, who is standing for re-election in East Dunbartonshire in Scotland, is busy trying to persuade people who have received their postal votes this week to back her. The weather is sunny and warm and the Business and Equalities Minister cheerful, but the outlook isn’t quite so good when you take a glance at the numbers. A poll by Lord Ashcroft last week put the SNP on 40 per cent, with Swinson trailing behind on 29 per cent. That’s a 19.5 per cent

A Lib Dem West Country MP told me at the start of the year that he thought his party would keep his seat if the Tories were broadly ahead in the national polls on polling day but lose it if they were level or behind. His thinking was that if it looked like Cameron was going to continue as Prime Minister his constituents would both feel it was safe to vote for a local champion and would want some protection against the Tories cutting public services too far. But if the Tories were behind, he feared that these swing voters would feel that they had to vote Tory to try

You have to hand it to the Liberal Democrats: they know how to put out a press release. Following accusations in the Guardian that Grant Shapps or someone ‘under his clear direction’ has been editing Wikipedia pages of his rivals, the Lib Dems have put out a press release dripping in sarcasm from Paddy Ashdown: ‘Grant Shapps is a fine man and has never done anything dodgy’. Here is the full text: Grant Shapps is a wonderful human being, a literary great and has in no way ever brought his party or politics into disrepute, the Chairman of the Liberal Democrat General Election Campaign said. Paddy Ashdown called the Conservative

Jonathan Freedland has written a compelling column on the challenge that Ed Miliband will face to establish his legitimacy if he becomes Prime Minister despite Labour not having won the most seats or votes. But I suspect that whoever becomes the government after May the 8th will have difficulty in persuading everyone that they have a right to govern. The Tory-Liberal Democrat coalition could claim that 59 per cent of voters had backed its constituent parts. It also had a comfortable majority in the House of Commons with 364 out of 650 seats. Now, unless something dramatic happens, no governing combination is likely to have anything like that kind of

Earlier this year Mr S revealed how plans for a set of campaign posters for the Conservative candidate Flick Drummond had to be revised after the Tories realised that from a distance the poster could be misread as another word starting with F. Now Matthew Hancock has fallen victim to an unforeseeable error in his own campaign literature. A Lib Dem supporter has noticed an unfortunate fault that occurs on folding the Tory MP’s campaign leaflet: Mr S hopes no one gets the wrong idea.

What do the next generation of MPs think with regards to public services, government spending and taxes? Coffee House has got its hands on new research by Ipsos MORI on the opinions of prospective parliamentary candidates from the main parties. The pollsters interviewed almost one hundred PPCs – 26 Conservative, 29 Labour, 20 Liberal Democrat and 11 SNP – who are all standing in marginal or safe seats, and therefore stand a good chance of making it to the green benches after the general election. Here are the points that stand out: 1: Defence cuts on the front line Defence cuts lead the way for both Labour and Liberal Democrat candidates who

“I’ve got it too,” said David Cameron, whipping out the ‘contract with Britain’ he published five years ago. His team seems have prepared him for the format of Evan Davis’s BBC interviews: confront the subject with discomfiting material, probe a bit and see what happens. But he was less prepared for being challenged from the right.  Davis asked him on his failure to commit to the basic Nato minimum of spending 2pc of GDP on defence – in spite of his badgering other countries to do so at the Nato summit in Wales. “I don’t think that you’re willing to say Britain will stick to its international obligation on defence,” he said. “We’re keeping it clearly

Last week, the Greens released ‘Change the Tune’, a party political broadcast on YouTube. It features actors playing Cameron, Clegg, Miliband and Farage all singing in harmony. All four men are indistinguishable from one another. Ukip and the Lib Dems are the same, went the message. Only the Greens are different. Met with wild adulation from Green supporters and bewildered scepticism from more-or-less everyone else, the video has been the most high profile video of the campaign so far. Buckle up – it’s time for viral politics. YouTube and other platforms hosting political videos side-by-side with popular culture will play a significant role in this election. This is not particularly controversial. Political videos are

Nick Clegg produced Lib Dem red lines for any coalition with either Labour or the Tories in an interview with Evan Davis this evening. Clegg said that he wouldn’t go into Coalition with the Tories if they insisted on making £12 billion of cuts to welfare in the next two years. But he said that he also couldn’t recommend going into coalition with Labour until they were clearer about how they planned to deal with the deficit, making clear that what Labour said today was not sufficient. As Fraser says, this was an assured performance from Clegg who offered a robust defence of the government’s record. The Liberal Democrats would