Author Archives: NewsHound

In an interview with the I, Ed Davey has announced that the Lib Dems are picking candidates in “blue wall” seats like Chesham and Amersham with the aim of taking seats off the Tories at the next General Election.

Speaking in Guildford, a former Lib Dem seat held by the Tories since 2005, Sir Ed said: “We’re selecting our candidate, do it early and get them on the doorstep.”

He added: “If we get through these selections, which are now going well apace, we’ll have campaigns, we’ll have people who are going out there and knocking on doors, week in week out, listening to people, and the Tory MPs are going to find them getting worried. They’ll start feeling that at the local level but it will feed through to the national level.”

He talked about his experience of knocking on doors in Chesham and Amersham:

The count in London started yesterday in three very large venues across the city:  Olympia, Alexandra Palace and Excel Centre. So far results have been declared for 7 of the 14 Assembly constituencies, all with no political change – 4 Labour and 3 Conservatives. We are hoping to win our first ever constituency in South West London but it will be close.

Votes were also counted for the London Mayoral in those 7 areas and at the moment Sadiq Khan is ahead of the Conservative Shaun Bailey by 39% to 37% on first preferences. Lib Dem Luisa Porritt is lying fourth behind the Green. The Mayor is elected by the supplementary vote system, so if no-one achieves 50% in the first round the second preferences for third placed candidates and below are added to the top two. Of course, we are not expecting to get into the top two, but the first preference votes for the Mayor give us some indication of how they are stacking up in the list vote.

The party list vote is used to allocate the remaining 11 seats to the Assembly, in proportion. We have only ever gained seats through the list, and last time round we only managed one seat. We are hoping for more this time.