It’s coming to that time when nobody wants to leave anything to chance, when the pressure is on. Yes, I’m talking about the end of the football season, with titles, promotion and relegation still to be decided.

I spent part of yesterday at Portman Road, as Ipswich Town fought out a rather nervy 2-2 draw with promotion rivals Middlesbrough, in front of nearly 30,000 spectators, and was struck by the similarities with a political campaign. You bring together the best team you can muster, prepare as best you can, determine the appropriate strategy to defeat your opponent and hope that the ball runs kindly for you on the big day.

At least, that’s how it often used to be. Nowadays, with five political parties all vying for supremacy, the variables can be bewildering and the outcomes potentially even more so. As that veteran of Birmingham politics, Paul Tilsley, said to the Guardian,

I think the result is going to be somewhat of a bugger’s muddle. I cannot see you getting to a result on 7 May where you could put two parties together to govern Birmingham. No single party is going to win.

I suspect that, where I am, in Ipswich, the picture is similar. The town has traditionally been a Labour/Conservative marginal, but with both parties unpopular and vulnerable, the Greens and Reform will hope to lure voters away from the left and right, whilst Liberal Democrats will hope to benefit from politically homeless centre-right voters. I frankly wouldn’t like to call either the Borough or County Council outcomes, and I suspect that there’ll be an outbreak of genuinely “no overall control” authorities post-7 May. Mind you, Ipswich still elects in thirds, so the worst case scenario will still leave Labour in control here.

It’s a busy week ahead too, with Sir Kier Starmer supposedly under increasing pressure over the continued fallout from the Mandelson Affair. Whilst I find myself wondering where any replacement might come from, we will at least get greater insight into how the vetting system works. And that leads me to, perhaps, one obvious question – why would you announce a highly sensitive appointment before the vetting is completed? It’s almost as though the vetting is irrelevant, that a box must be ticked. It is an odd way to run a railway.

In site news, we’ve had another “moderation curiosity” this weekend, what I like to describe as “the Scunthorpe paradox”, whereby a word included in a comment has triggered our automatic moderation software even though the trigger word forms part of another, otherwise harmless, word. Readers are reminded that, occasionally, our moderation software does the unexpected. For example, one of our readers was always being auto-moderated for reasons that we couldn’t understand, until we discovered that the word ‘weasel‘ kept coming up, even when it wasn’t in the comment. It turned out to be a browser software issue but it does just go to show, doesn’t it? But do bear with us if your comment is held up – we are volunteers and life does sometimes get in the way.

But what do we have for you today? We welcome another first time contributor, Nina Wessel, who warns us of Labour’s continued degradation of the right to protest, whilst Mark Corner offers his view on how the United Kingdom might best return to the European Union. Jean-Francois Burford is back, on a subject close to my heart, culture policy and, as always, Mathew Hulbert will be back with his punchy view on events. The House of Lords is continuing to push back against some of the more egregious Labour legislation, and we’ll pick up where we left off later in the day.

And so, without further ado…

* Mark Valladares is the Monday Editor of Liberal Democrat Voice.