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Which Lib Dem MPs received the most media mentions between 1st September 2007 and 30th November, 2007? To find out I trawled Lexis-Nexis’s online database of all UK national newspapers (and a huge number of regional ones), feeding in the names of each of our MPs in turn, and seeing how many returns were generated.

To qualify, the MP must have been mentioned either as a Liberal Democrat or Lib Dem. This will disadvantage those MPs who are working their regional media hard, but whose names do not appear under the party’s banners. Sorry, but them’s the rules.

Anyway, here’s the list in descending order of media mentions (with their 2006-07 positions in brackets):

There’s nothing amateur psephologists and party hacks like more then feeding the latest poll figures into Martin Baxter’s Electoral Calculus seats predictor. Tonight, there’s a small ripple of excitement in the blogosphere as it shows the Lib Dems with zero (0) seats.

From which we can infer two possible conclusions:

1. The Baxter model is nonsensical for three party politics (which is what now de facto exists in the UK);

2. Or the Lib Dems are going to find themselves in a worse position than the Liberal Party in 1979, which retained 11 MPs even after Jeremy Thorpe’s resignation and the

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Chris Huhne’s new zero-carbon Britain proposals – which Chris wrote about for Lib Dem Voice last week – have met with the glowing approval of Guardian economics correspondent, Ashley Seagar:

At last someone in the mainstream of politics is taking climate change seriously. … when one of the main parties comes up with a coherent strategy for dealing with climate change, both at home and abroad, it deserves close attention, particularly as … Labour has made very little progress in moving to a sustainable energy economy, and knows it. The Tories, too, although talking about taxing flights, will duck serious policy changes when their Quality of Life report emerges later this month.

The LibDem document makes for fascinating reading.

Lib Dems, SNP and the Greens united at Holyrood last night united in rejecting Labour and Tory plans to replace Trident at a cost of £20 billion.

The Lib Dems successfully amended the original Green motion to state that Trident should not be replaced “at this time” to allow for the system’s use in future multilateral disarmament talks (and in line with party policy). They also pointed out that defence matters aren’t devolved, so the vote won’t make a blind bit of difference.

Lib Dem MSP Mike Rumbles argued:

We believe that the key to a safer world is to

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