Good heavens, wasn’t Thursday night fun? It’s been nearly twenty years since I enjoyed an election night that much, given that even 2010 was bittersweet as a series of seats slipped out of our grasp just when we thought that a massive surge was on.

Watching Conservative MP after Conservative MP lose their seats was reassurance that the British public can’t be fooled all of the time, taking the opportunity to find imaginative ways to defeat a discredited and disgraced administration. And to see so many new faces, many of whom will be new even to our own membership, can only inspire a new generation of activists to push on in next year’s local elections, both to shore up our support in the gained seats, but to create a new set of potential targets for 2029.

Because times are about to get interesting. Labour are going to have to do something similar in those seats that they gained on 4 July, especially those in rural areas such as Bury St Edmunds and Stowmarket or Suffolk Coastal in my neighbourhood, where they won despite the almost total absence of a local government base. We know that their activist base is predominantly urban, but does success breed a new activist base for them beyond the old heartlands?

Meanwhile, the Conservatives are going to have to decide what they’re going to be in the near future. Are they a modern Christian Democrat-style political party, or a collection of populists, a la Reform UK. And, if they choose the latter, who will fill the centre-right vacuum they leave behind? I’m not convinced that we should look for that space particularly, given the manifesto we’ve just run on, and the likelihood that we’ll be looking to make further progress against them at local government level in the years ahead.

But, with the caveat that I’m a bureaucrat and not a campaigner, I have to say that I thought that our campaign was fought extremely well, a view that I held long before polling day. As a member of Federal Council, I was fortunate enough to see much of the work that had gone on long in advance of the actual campaign, and thus had genuine insight into what was likely to happen, if not what it would achieve in the end. And I have to say that I was impressed by the discipline and the quality of the campaign that unrolled over six weeks. It was proof that good data allows credible (and flexible) decision making, and I fear that a number of our campaigns may have learnt the hard way what is genuinely required to make the breakthrough. Challenging Key Performance Indicators, accountability and communication meant that scarce resources could be targeted in such a way as to maximise wins, and whilst such a model might not be as effective next time, it offers a strong foundation upon which to build.

My concern in the approach to polling day was that hindsight might distort our collective opinion on the efficacy of the strategy. After all, if a strategy is followed to the letter and the results don’t reflect the work done, we liberals have a tendency to assume that the leadership were wrong, almost regardless of the external factors that might have impacted upon us. At the same time, there is always a danger that a result beyond our wildest dreams leads us to assume that the campaign was perfect. At least this time, the review of the campaign is likely to be rather more cheering, although I guess that there are those at HQ who are already looking to 2029.

The hope now must be that, with 72 MPs, our voice gets a better hearing in the media and amongst the public. And that changes the game significantly, as we all know what tends to happen when we get decent coverage…

* Mark Valladares is the Monday Editor of Liberal Democrat Voice, and a member of the Party’s Federal Council.