It’s gone largely unremarked so far, but Mark Walklate, who is standing as an independent candidate in the Crewe & Nantwich by-election, is a former Conservative activist.

He stood for the Conservatives in both the 2006 and 2007 local elections. Moreover, his nomination papers look to have been signed by two prominent local Conservative activists. All in all, that doesn’t seem like a happy ship.

P.S. It’s always unfortunate if you get your own phone number wrong in your leaflets. It’s doubly so when the wrong phone number turns out to be for the member of another party. But it’s quite nice of the Conservatives to be pointing their supporters at a Liberal Democrat member.

An excellent day yesterday with Nick Clegg and a lot of press interest. We’ve got a big operation going and had a very good number of helpers in today already.

This is a really important weekend - the team proved yesterday that we are well set up to deal with large numbers. We just need lots of people every day!

The news from the doorsteps is encouraging. It’s been a pleasure to be out and about. The big Elizabeth Shenton posters are going down a storm - as is Elizabeth herself with both the team and the public.

I’ve seldom come across a candidate who engages more naturally with the public. The other parties clearly don’t have that advantage.

Personally, having knocked on quite a few doors, I haven’t found a determined Labour voter yet, and most Tories seem far from convinced by both their candidate and their leader.

This is a by-election where there plenty of issues for people to get fired up about and plenty to talk about on the doorsteps. We have an exciting few days left ahead of us!

Hilary Stephenson is the party’s Director of Campaigns & Elections

An interesting snippet from some of the Labour material in the Crewe & Nantwich by-election: they are attacking the Conservative candidate for the (current, known to have changed a few times) Conservative policy of opposing ID cards.

However, from what I’ve seen of it, they’ve mostly given up on most of the arguments previously used and instead retreated into the following very narrow approach:

Do you oppose making foreign nationals carry an ID card?

The use of the word “foreign” there seems to come with some rather unpleasant overtones in this context, the implication being that ‘ooh, foreigners - they’re terribly nasty aren’t they - so surely you can’t be against keeping tabs on them now, can you?’

The more positive aspect of this slightly desperate approach is that it could indicate overall how badly the case for ID cards is going for Labour. The campaign group No2ID has been busy running online adverts in the constituency, which may be adding to the pressure on Labour.

UPDATE: It looks like some Labour members are pretty unhappy with this line too.

The usually very reliable Times political correspondent Sam Coates’ Red Box blog carried a rather bizarre posting yesterday, alleging the Lib Dems had more or less given up on Crewe. Party chief exec and by-election genius Lord Rennard soon put him right:

Just come to our HQ in Crewe and see us there for proof of our very serious intent! The Labour vote is very weak (as evidenced by our gains in Crewe South in the local elections) - so Lib Dems will aim to repeat earlier by-election successes.

And today the Lib Dems’ director of campaigns, Hilay Stephenson, issued this clarion call for assistance to party members:

It it is just 13 days to polling day in the Crewe and Nantwich by-election.

We’ve got off to a flying start with a tremendously strong by-election team and an exceptional candidate in Elizabeth Shenton, who has already made a strong impression on voters and the local press.

Here’s what the Crewe Chronicle had to say yesterday:

Elizabeth Shenton must be optimistic after her party pushed Labour into third place in the local elections. The Liberal Democrats took 25% of the vote nationally while Labour took 24%.

But we have a VERY short time indeed. We expect postal vote ballot papers to arrive with voters on Saturday and Monday, and this means we have a lot of work to do delivering and knocking on doors this weekend. Nick Clegg will be with us today to support Elizabeth’s campaign and we need your help to make a big splash right through this weekend.

Our canvass shows that the millionaire Tory candidate is failing to impress and Gordon Brown’s Labour candidate is not convincing the voters. There is all to play for. We just need enough people to come NOW to help us keep up the momentum.

Full details of how to get to our HQ are at www.elizabethshenton.com/help-elizabeth-win and you can read more about what an excellent person we have in Elizabeth at www.elizabethshenton.com/elizabeth-shenton-biography

The Henley contest will not be far behind and we are already in full swing there as well, with our HQ up and running and another very impressive by-election operation under way.

We know that the Tories will be bringing people in from all over the south this weekend. We know from experience that making an early impact is vital. We have lots of delivery and canvassing there waiting to be done. Please come and get our Henley campaign off to the flying start it needs. Full details of our HQ (in Thame) are at www.henleylibdems.org.uk/contact/

After all, what better way to spend a spring weekend than exploring the by-ways of Oxfordshire or Cheshire?

Both campaigns are giving us an excellent opportunity to push our positive agenda - and to really catch the attention of the public.

I look forward to seeing you!

Best wishes,

Hilary Stephenson
Director of Campaigns, Liberal Democrats

P.S. The weather forecast in both places this weekend is for a sunny weekend - perfect campaigning weather!

* sincere apologies for the headline.

Back last year when we had two Parliamentary by-elections going on at the same time, in Ealing Southall and Sedgefield, there was a concerted online campaign by Conservatives making comments around the web to claim that the Liberal Democrats were struggling in Ealing, had given up on winning and were instead concentrating on Sedgefield. My favourite was the supposed eye-witness account from someone in Ealing who claimed they saw people in the Liberal Democrat HQ there preparing lots of letters for Sedgefield.

It all seemed to dry up rather after the Grant Shapps 1234 incident but it looks as if the fairytale is raising its head again. For once more we have two Parliamentary by-election on at the same time (well, nearly - Boris Johnson has said he’ll quit as MP though he hasn’t announced his resignation yet), once again the Conservatives are worried about the Liberal Democrats, and once again the fairy tale comes out to play.

In this case, it’s Edward Timpson and his campaign blog, which spins the fairy tale that:

Chris Rennard, who runs all the Lib Dem campaigns, has also been spotted briefing journalists. The talk around all the journalists up here is that he doesn’t think the Lib Dems can get anywhere in Crewe and Nantwich and so he wants to divert all their resources to Henley instead.

Sounds familiar doesn’t it? Oh, and I think you’ll find that none of the journalists in Crewe who spoke to Chris Rennard today mentioned this at all. So much for it being what they’re talking about!

A rather unfortunate posting over on Iain Dale’s blog this evening about the Crewe and Nantwich by-election. Iain writes:

It seems to me that the Conservatives should be very careful not fight an aggressive campaign here. They don’t need to launch attacks on the Labour Candidate. They need to be the voice of sweet reason and play up their candidate’s local record - but then go for Gordon Brown’s throat on the 10p tax debacle and other issues. And this is exactly what Edward Timpson seems to be doing. He’s just released this rather interesting letter to the press…

Curiously, he then only quotes the first half of Edward Timpson’s news release, leaving out the second half. Can you guess what the second half of the release contains? Ah, that’d be a series of personal attacks on the Labour Candidate.

Oops.

(If you want to read the bits that Iain’s posting doesn’t mention, you can read them here.)

UPDATE: As Iain makes clear in a comment below, the version of the release he saw didn’t include the second half.

Edward Timpson, the Conservative candidate for the Crewe & Nantwich by-election, is busy calling himself local. So I thought I’d take a look at his official biography on the Conservative Party website. And here’s what I found:

(Click on the thumbnail to see full size version.)

Update: just to provide a little background as I commented below: the reason for picking up on this is that the Conservatives are running the message that their candidate is local whilst also saying ours isn’t. That seems to me a fair target for criticism, particular as both parts of their message are being made at the same time in the same leaflet, which after all amounts to applying different standards on different pages of the very same leaflet. It all makes the paucity of the actual constituency references in the Conservative candidate’s official biography rather striking.