Yes, blogs are navel gazing – duh. I’ve never considered blogs to be a particularly valuable campaigning tool and don’t treat my own as one. It’s just a place where I go to shoot my mouth off. But having run the odd winning election campaigns, having been part of a team which has delivered a piece of grassroots-led legislation, and having just this afternoon commissioned a million campaign postcards for a project I’m working on, I think I do walk the talk and am entitled to shoot the breeze on my lunch break.

I’m not sure everyone else on this thread can say the same (and for the avoidence of all doubt here, Mark Littlewood is a very notable exception – whatever other disagreements I may have with him, he’s a brilliant campaigner).

my perspective is that in politics it takes a very long time to build a reputation (and with it the brand and image etc), and a very short time to destroy it…we have effectively done just that over the last two years, mainly due to the way the leadership issue has been handled. We did something similar in the late 80s in the way we handled the merger negotiations with more than a little naval gazing – the result was that we trashed the alliance brand which had been popular although problemetic, and it took ten years under Paddy’s leadership to rebuild our political credibility and identity.

…so I despair at yet more naval gazing about how we re-invent and repackage ourselves; the superficial stuff passes and falls away pretty quickly and the real question emerges – are we an alternative government, a brand of competance which people can trust, and the media can cut us a bit of slak?

At the moment defitively not! As long as this remains the case, talented people at all levels from local activist to parliamentarian will give up the electoral game and drift away to other activities (or other parties)..

I do not propose to respond to any further things you write as it will only give you the opportunity to examine your belly button in greater detail.

Not to revisit old debates, but the point I was trying and failed in my rush to make was that branding must be owned and lead by the leader. A President coming in on a platform of rebranding the party is likely to do a bad job if the leader is not on board. That is one of the fundamental reasons why I don’t think the presidential election is the appropriate platform for this debate.

I can quite understand why people might not want to agree with my main theme. They might even be right.

But the problem on the narrative and the branding is that no single view prevails.

Rather than deciding too many things, we prevaricate too often.

Rather than saying – “it’s a tough call between X and Y, but we’re going for Y”, we tend to say “X is good and Y is good. We can have a bit of each”. That’s confusing and unclear and, very often, impossible.

In terms of party structure, I want to involve more people in more decisions.

But I’m not saying that each LibDem voter should pick their favourite pantone shade and we should mix this into a proportional pot…and the resulting colour will be our new party colour. (note: it would be brown).

I wonder whether we might be better off pursuing a second (or even third, fourth or fifth) best strategy decisively than forever trying to compromise between all points of view.

however, whether we can run with it as a main theme is another question…like i said i think whatever narrative we have the major issue with our brand is the credibility gap….

you might be right about being mealy mouthed…especially when it has come to the bank bail out….

But I don’t.

I liked Ming Campbell’s early statements along the lines of “I am only seeking power in order to give it away.”

On being pissed off – we can’t (and shouldn’t be) pissed off about everything. But the things we are pissed off about, we should be really pissed off about. I think the danger at the moment is sounding too mealy-mouthed rather than too awkward.

Is this not a bit of a logical non-sequiter, asking people to elect politicians on an anti-politician and anti-politics ticket?

A degree of being ‘pissed off’ is ok but too much and you are just seen as a habitual awkward squad.

My core message would be “we’re going to get politicians and politics out of your lives. They control too much money, have too much power and too much say on your life decisions. This has to end.”

My broad thematic would be “angry but also determined”. We should therefore come across as more pissed off and less analytical about things. I don’t think I’m ever likely to vote (or have the opportunity to vote) for Norman Baker to be party leader! But I wish more of our spokespeople had his approach.

Example: Iraq war. We made hay out of this issue, but only enough hay to fill a couple of barns.

My response to the Labour attack “Vote LibDem, get Tory” in the last week of the 2005 campaign would have been “Vote Blair, get Bush”. I would have devoted an entire PEB – probably the last one – to accusing anyone who campaigned, leafleted (or perhaps even voted Labour) of doing the dirty work of Bush’s Republicans in a country they were trying to convert into a satellite state of the Pentagon. Ok, this is pretty hard-core stuff, but you get the gist.

I also say this as someone who wasn’t initially or instinctively opposed to the Iraq war and who thought in 2000 that Bush might turn out to be a compassionate conservative!

Or one-nation Conservatism which is a more subtle way of saying the same thing. Ok, take that as granted what is your thematic suggestion for re-branding?? Elsewhere I have said that ‘Make it happen’ is ok but we need to show examples of where we have made it happen.

On the second point you may be right about them not caring but saying trust us we are honest doesnt really sound like much of a strategy for me…i think if pushed thats not what people are looking for in government; its an aspect but not necessarily one we lack in….

I refer you to the branding definition I gave a moment ago. It isn’t just about the logo. The logo is pretty trivial all told.

The point is to get across a general style of approach/theme. The Cameron Conservative brand is basically “we are not extreme right-wing bastards anymore”. Everything else in branding terms is really a means of reinforcing that message of change from extreme to moderate (the logo and use of shades of green included). The broad evidence is that Cameron’s branding has bene successful (although he’s been blessed witha hapless government, of course).

We need to do something similar.

In my humble guesstimate, LibDem protestations about being “highly ambitious”, “hungry for power”, “trebling our seats over ten years” etc. just don’t achieve very much. Maybe this is because they aren’t wholly believeable, but my guess is most people don’t care. I think it’s more attractive (and truer) to say “well, yeah, what I’m arguing for might be unpopular, but I believe it. Unlike the other two parties, I won’t say what you want to hear.”

It is a chicken and egg problem but it’s one we actually need to set about solving because it’s one good reason why we are not heading for government any time soon.

The simple answer to your question is errr yes that is exactly it; people wont want to elect us as a government until we can credibly form one and to do that we need to be both an effective opposition and one that actually looks like a government in waiting which errr we don’t. Changing a logo here and there and ‘sexing-up’ wont change that.

It’s a simple rule of politics and indeed life that this is the case; i remember not being promoted at work once until i actually started to act like i already was a supervisor.

People dont expect honesty from politics but yes it helps. Having said that it’s sad but probably true that people would elect a competant party over an honest one. Having said that this is where I chime in and say we should drop hyperbolic rhetoric about preparing for government…

This gets me back to the point I was making earlier in this thread that the message and the method must match in order to for a programme to be successful.

James’ point is vital in this.

I agree that the party brand shouldn’t be the responsibility of the president, but I also agree that it shouldn’t be left to the committees. I’d prefer it resulted from the ongoing consultative conversation between each part of the party structure – much more inclusive and much more democratic!

FWIW from what I’ve seen and heard of Chandila I think he’d make a good committee spokesperson as I think he’s shown that’s where his talents and interests are.

On the age-old “narrative” debate. Sometimes, I think the problem is that everyone debates what narrative they want, rather than agreeing that we need oen and empowering someone to set it. I think the same might apply on branding. that’s why I’m quite pleased that much of the debate is based around whether we need to go through this exercise, rather than just a load of people giving their view of what the brand should be.

I disagree with Darrell, or rather think that he raises a chicken-and-egg problem. We won’t be seen as a party of government without becoming one (or at least getting closer to becoming one). So we need to make electoral advance by acting and behaving a bit more like one. Being properly branded and a bit less ramshackle would be a step in this direction (although I don’t think anyone would argue it’s enough).

Isn’t a party being ready for government a bit like a party being seen as honest? It’s not a claim it can make for itself with any credibility…

To my mind our main problem is that we are not seen as a credible party of government – regardless of what our narrative debate is. We can have the best narrative in the world and people still wont take any notice because as far as they are concerned in large numbers we won’t get in in any case.

Until we work on this I think any other issue is a needless diversion…