It’s hard to believe that it’s 6 weeks since Rishi Sunak stood in the rain in Downing Street to fire the starting gun to the General Election campaign.
Since then, there hasn’t been much movement in the polls, apart from a few points up for us, sparked by the brilliant, positive, incredible images and messages coming from our leader. What a time to come in to the form of your life, Ed Davey!
This party has fought our best campaign for years at every possible level. Our media spokespeople have been amazing. Ed has shown in the debates, Question Times and interviews that there is a huge amount of substance behind the style. He has tackled tough questions head on, with honesty and humility.
It’s all getting real now. Tomorrow, people in our target seats will have to clear a path through their Lib Dem leaflets to their door and go out to vote. Some will still be wrestling with their choice even as they stand in the voting booth with the pencil in hand. We need to be in their heads with our positive messages at that point. That is why it is so important that we get our eve of polls and good mornings out and knock on as many doors and make as many phone calls as possible.
And it’s why it is really really important that every single ounce of our efforts goes into seats where we are in the running.
If you need convincing of this, here’s the North East Fife result from 2017:
Stephen Gethins Scottish National Party 13,743 32.9% -8.1%
Elizabeth Riches Liberal Democrat 13,741 32.9% 1.5%
Tony Miklinski Conservative 10,088 24.1% 7.8%
Rosalind Garton Labour 4,026 9.6% 1.9%
Mike Scott-Hayward Independent 224 0.5% 0.5%
Two votes in it. Don’t let that happen again.
And even this May 97 more votes could have given us control of 3 more Councils.
What you do and where you do it on Polling day really matters. If you can’t travel, please think about making calls from home – or from holiday.
The messages that the Tories are putting out might seem bizarre to us. Their “letter from July 2044” aimed at bringing Reform voters back on board is probably the weirdest bit of literature we’ve ever seen, but we are not their target audience.
Mel Stride’s extraordinary comments this morning that you need enough Tories around to scrutinise Labour are very strange indeed. The only thing that the Tories will be capable of scrutinising over the next five years will be each other, with menaces. They are a party riven with irreconcilable differences and they will make a load of ferrets in a sack seem like the best of friends.
If you want a really good opposition to Labour, you will need a coherent, confident, capable party to keep their feet to the fire. So you obviously need lots of Liberal Democrats.
The most dangerous thing that we can do today is think that the Tories have given up. They never give up. They will do whatever it takes to cling on to power, even make out that a blind Lib Dem candidate is pretending to be blind. They will be utterly ruthless. We need to counter their negativity with our boots on the ground and phone calls.
We can stop them if we all work together. Think how good it would be if we managed to send a strong contingent of Lib Dem MPs and re-take third largest party on Friday. Let’s do it.
Oh, and the second most dangerous thing we can do in the next 36 hours is, in the immortal words of Toby Ziegler from the West Wing, to tempt the “wrath of the Whatever from High Atop the Thing.” Don’t assume anything. Get out there and don’t leave anything on the doorsteps.
4 Comments
Could Ed do something dramatic like swim the Channel to emphasise that we still want to re-enter the EU or at least the Single Market? Only joking but I am really surprised how fit he is. He’s had a great campaign. Both Sunak and Starmer seem too defensive to me.
So hope I’m being unduly pessimistic but cannot see us having more than 32-33 MPs come Friday. And can’t imagine the Tories having less than 135. I do think we’ll be unsuccessful by less than 5000 votes in around 25-30 seats.
Yes Jonathan I share your thoughts and doubts. I just want to see a solid block of Lib Dem MPs third largest group in the House. 25 should do it, but delighted by 30, over the moon with 35, anything else a bonus.
If the polls are to be believed it could be anything from 35 – 80! If that was to happen the person responsible for organising such an achievement should get a knighthood and the freedom of Sutton and Cheam. Like all Lib Dems the thought of waking up tomorrow morning with Ed Davey Leader of the Opposition would be so wonderful as to be worth a million pounds but no it is fanciful. If he did will he swim up the Thames from Kingston?
One thing he won’t want to do Theakes is swim the Thames…not with Thames Water history of discharge.