Writing this piece, I started by looking back at what was written on Nick’s first anniversary a year ago.
Over 2008 the party was averaging around 16% in the polls and whilst showing a great deal of promise, the consensus was that Clegg still had some way to go to fulfil his potential, with the Lisbon Treaty confusion and that Piers Morgan interview being two of the more memorable moments.
2009 has been a very different story. It’s still been a struggle to get our voice heard in the national media – that’s not going to change anytime soon outside the official election period. But it’s a struggle in which the party, and Clegg’s team in particular, are getting a lot better at gaining the upper hand.
Think of the Gurkhas; of the MPs’ expenses scandal. Think of the economic debates and the Queen’s Speech. Look at the poll ratings, averaging 3% higher than last year on the back of a steady stream of local by-election victories.
What’s happened?
Nick’s become a lot more assured and confident – witness his performances in Prime Minister’s Questions, where he frequently lands more hits with two questions than Cameron manages with six.
Importantly, Nick and his team are getting better at grabbing that most precious of commodities for the third party – media attention.
They’ve figured out it isn’t enough to send out a stream of slightly dull press releases, no matter how worthy they might be. To get noticed, the Lib Dems have to not only say something different, but say it in a different way too.
So we had Nick with Joanna Lumley after the Gurkha victory, Nick calling for the summer recess to be cancelled while MPs reformed our outdated system, Nick suggesting the whole Queen’s Speech should be scrapped and, controversially, Nick’s call for “savage cuts” at the party conference in Bournemouth.
We also saw the successful promotion of other front benchers. Not just the sainted Vince, but also MPs like Chris Huhne, Evan Harris and Norman Baker making an impact. It’s a sign of Nick’s growing confidence and standing that the reappearance on the national stage of both Charles Kennedy and Paddy Ashdown added to his stature rather than attracting negative comparisons.
At this stage in the parliament the media narrative could easily have cut out the Lib Dems completely. That it hasn’t and that, even without an Iraq war-style issue to boost us, the party is polling in the late teens and early twenties three to six months out from the general election, is a good sign.
There’s still a long way to go, but the signs are positive for a Lib Dem election showing a lot better than many would have feared earlier in the parliament when the party giving its dirty linen an airing with two changes of leader in as many years. Nick and his team deserve a big chunk of the credit.
Follow @libdemvoice.org on Bluesky
Like us on Facebook
Subscribe to our feed
Sign-up for our daily email digest
Welcome immigrants (3)
Friday nights at the Botanic Garden - and Saturday mornings too! #dundeewestend
Starmer's race to the bottom
Thought for the Day: "We know that at night-time someone goes by amongst the trees, but we never speak of it"
Order of Service
Neil Alexander selected for Inverness and Nairn
Steve Trevethan
John Waller
Mark Valladares
David Evans
Luke Magalhaes
2 Comments
Nick and Vince constantly emphais that the Lib Dems are a team, and Nick is superb at his role within the team, He has got the confidence and the intellect to be a major political player and what the party needs more than anything else at trhis stage is for him to be leader for a consoderable num,ber of years
Half of the media is actively hostile to us, the other half is too lazy/thick to go out and find out what is really happening in politics, so falls back on outdated models and tired old stereotypes. The biggest and most outdated stereotype is that we still have a two-party Labour-Conservative system, with most people having strong loyalties to one or the other of these, and those in the middle most strongly influenced by national political imagery, hence the concept of a national “swing”.
Our party has worked for decades using a simple discovery. Most people are not as committed to one of Labour and Conservative as is supposed. Most people pay little attention to national political news, and the amount of sensible political coverage in the national media is shrinking anyway. The other two parties do not have the big memberships they used to. So it is remarkably easy for us to win – so long as we have a few dozen committed activists in a constituency – which is many places we don’t, about a dozen is more the norm.
What we need is a national political leadership which works with this. Stealth campaigning locally, building up support from people who are surprisingly open to straightforward political arguments given to them directly through their letterboxes. The people of this country are starved of decent politics aimed at them and from people they can see are part of them. They will respond if we give it to them. We have shown this time and time again in a great diversity of places.
Unfortunately, our national image just does not work with this successful model of politics. It continues to be about a somewhat ineffectual leader (I mean anyone who is leading us, not just Nick Clegg), saying things which, because of the erratic reporting of the national media, sometimes come across as sensible, sometimes as silly. It leaves people who only know about us through that thinking “well, I’m not sure about that lot, they seem to mean well, but I don’t think I can really trust them because don’t they have some silly ideas, and anyway they can’t win”.