During the week I blogged about how it looked like the Conservatives would be throwing their national kitchen sink at only around 10 Liberal Democrat held constituencies.
That compares to 38 seats won by the Lib Dems in 2010 in which the Conservatives finished second, and would mean quite a few Liberal Democrats MPs not facing an all-out nationally-backed challenge in their seat – undoubtedly good news for the party.
Now ConservativeHome and the Birmingham Post have more on quite what the Conservatives will be doing:
At the heart of the 40/40 campaign is an ambition to hold forty seats and win another forty. This will be enough to win a majority but not a large one. Conservative sources are keen to point out, however, that winning forty seats is not necessarily the limit of their ambition. Resources will be devoted to these target seats and the effects will be monitored. If Con HQ feels that these seats are safely heading into the blue column extra target seats will be added. My source told me that the number of target seats should increase to about seventy before the general election. The original plan had more ambitiously been to immediately target fifty seats (36 from Labour and 14 from the LibDems and when there was only due to be 600 seats in total) and hold another fifty.
Note too what sort of campaigning tactics the Ashcroft-funded research has concluded is worth investing in:
Eighty new campaign managers are being recruited… The party will be building additional infrastructure for leaflet delivery.
* Mark Pack is Party President and is the editor of Liberal Democrat Newswire.
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6 Comments
Of course this could be part of a deal being hatched here: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/only-the-tories-can-keep-the-future-orange-8191052.html
Coupon anyone?
There is going to be a tough battle to defend a strong and independent party for Liberal Democrats.
Do they think that people will think they are the Lib Dems, because they gave out leaflets? Are they planning to print them with lots of yellow ?
Did their market research team go looking for information on how Lib Dems took seats from Labour in recent elections, and actually end up thinking that voters in those seats like whoever gives out the most leaflets?
I count 38 seats Mark! Although of those 38 I think there are 3 (I won’t name them) where Labour clearly has a greater chance of winning than the Tories, although I still think we will win them.
I like the Electoral Calculus site – this page gives a current list of seats which are vulnerable:
http://www.electoralcalculus.co.uk/gainloss.html
On the figures in the article it looks as though about 10 Lib Dem seats will be targeted immediately, and about 10 more will be added as targets by the election. (That’s if the total rises to 70 and the 50 originally planned included 14 Lib Dem seats.)
Is that particularly good news – if the Tories end up targeting 20 Lib Dem seats, which is more than half those in which they were second?
Andrew: Quite right; my typo – now fixed. Thanks.