About you now

When deciding what to say today, instead of taking more advice from his Very Clever advisers who have done such a splendid job over the past month, Gordon Brown should have listened to the Sugababes:

Can we bring yesterday
Back around
Cos I know how I feel
About you now

I was dumb I was wrong
I let you down
But I know how I feel
About you now

***

The sheer relief of not having an election in which they would have done very, very badly indeed has affected the Liberal Democrats' ability to reason. Ming Campbell put out a press release in which he said, "Gordon Brown should have called an election when he took office...The only way in which to get certainty in these matters is to have fixed term parliaments" [but if we had fixed-term parliaments, Gordon Brown couldn't have...ah well, never mind.]

I was out campaigning in a Labour/Lib Dem marginal constituency on Saturday, and I spoke to a lot of people who weren't at all interested in the election speculation, but were definitely supporting Labour, whereas in the past they were uninterested or actively hostile. The local MP and councillors are active, spend a lot of time keeping in touch with people and helping with their problems, and not surprisingly this counts a lot more with people than what the latest excitement is in the newspapers. If we want to turn round the Tory advantage in the marginal constituencies and stop Lord Ashcroft's attempts to buy the election, then this kind of active local campaigning needs to happen a lot more - fewer meetings just talking to other members of the party, more time spent instead talking to people we represent and aspire to represent.