Greenfield,

I think you have a fundamental misunderstanding of the way in which some people align themseleves to parties.

Sure, there are some that are “born” into a party. They will tend to follow a single party come what may. This is another manifestation of the “core vote” – something that the Lib Dems don’t have much of, incidentally, which is both a bane and a boon for you guys.

Then there are people – like me, in fact – interested in politics who, given the prevalence of party politics in much of the country, have to choose a party. So what does a liberal-minded, fairly centerist chap like myself do? Well, I could probably fit into any of the parties without too much complaint. So, after a great deal of reading around and talking to people, I choose one that seems to be closest to my personal political position (which is fairly clearly not the Lib Dems for reasons I would be happy to elaborate on but would be rather boring here).

But, if we want to get a little abstract for a moment, relatively small shifts of a party in “political space” can quite legitimately pull people one way or the other. In other words, I don’t think that it is unreasonable for someone to believe now that Cameron is the best bet for delivering a centre-right, liberal agenda where they didn’t feel this a year ago.

On top of this, it is quite possible that people compromise at the beginning (e.g. if I had decided to join the Lib Dems I have no doubt that I would be a Councillor by now given the political makeup of the area I am from) and then realise that in fact their heart is telling them something different.

Or, of course, thy could be just careerists although, as has been pointed out by the calls of “we’ll wipe this guy out come 2011″ this career is unlikely to be at the Councillor level, and the vast majority of the reasonable Conservative PPC slots for the next GE have been bagged already.

a. What got us into this mess in the first place.
b. Predjudice in another form.
c. The failed strategy we have been pursuing for the last ten years?

We could avoid so many of these problems if we made it clear to all people who join us that they are expected to prove themselves by years of hard work on the ground before being put into positions of responsibility.

Cameron’s strategy will back fire on him just as Blair’s Babes did on the Labour Party. We should stop trying to take short cuts.

Asians / ethnic minority councillors, members, activists are increasingly attracted by the Tory image of actively seeking to promote ethnic minority representatives within the Party.

OK so we all know that the Tories are only going out of their way to woo ethnic senior ethnic minority individuals from other Parties purely for political expediency

But if we just ignore defections like these we do so at our peril