Onoy the political anoraks are paying cursory attention and most of the general public have other things on their mind. To add to the problem the news industry have less staff and usually focus on the traditional end of year round ups.

I just get this bad feeling Nick’s elevation to leadership will be handicapped by being unable to make any real running on the news agenda in the critical first few weeks of his leadership and any following announcements will suffer from ever decreasing interest.

After an election we’d have to see which way the wind is blowing. Maybe entering a coalition with one of the two parties could be useful, maybe staying out is the best bet, but we won’t know until then.

Of all of these first 100 day posts, I thought that Simon Titley’s was the most promising, but whilst it talked about the need for a strategy, it unfortunately didn’t go into what he thinks that might be!

Cameron is going to make ground at the next election, and some of his party’s progress will be in winning seats we presently hold. The only way to counteract this was to capture more ground in currently Labour-held seats. This is very unlikely to happen if Labour supporters in 1997, 2001 and 2005 believe that the Lib Dems and Tories are very much alike.

Whether or not this is fair or objective, the fact that people even ask the question of what differentiates Cameron and Clegg should be proof enough of a simple fact: people believe that they are very similar. And why shouldn’t they think that? 93% of people’s impression is formed by how people look and how people sound, and only 7% is formed by what people actually say.

To argue that Cameron is different, as Clegg is doing, because different issues drove them into politics, is putting all your eggs in the basket that only gives 7% of a result. Cameron and Clegg look alike and sound alike, this will convince people that they are alike unless something drastic and dramatic happens to the contrary.

This impression suits Cameron down to the ground, so no such drastic or dramatic event is going to come from him. Nothing that happened during the leadership election suggests that Clegg believes such action is necessary or desirable, so the odds are very high that nothing like this will happen.

It is hard, in the light of this, to see a future which does not involve a marked Lib Dem decline for as long as Cameron and Clegg remain their respective parties’ leaders.

The leadership result has ignored a vital and basic lesson of modern communications – be distinctive. Figuring out how we do not pay the penalty should be the top priority.