I’m sure you have seen many references to this Harold Wilson quote over this last week and how especially true it has been for the Lib Dems. Many people have been commenting about how this change in polls (almost over night) has been crazy, and lets be honest it has! I Expected we might get a 3 maybe at most 5 point increase in UNS but to have some polls putting us ahead of both the Conservatives and Labour truly is remarkable.
However the TV debate was only on Thursday evening, there is still a very long period between now and when a full week has gone by. There is a lot of time for the media to finally actually discuss who Nick Clegg is (even though it has been 2 and a half years since he has been party leader) there is still time for some policies to lose us vote (lets be honest immigration, prisons and Europe are usually not the best vote winners and some people are already focusing on them.) and there is also a lot of time to have the right wing press/blogsphere to lay into whatever aspect they choose.
However this surely is a great opportunity, more right wing press coverage means more press coverage! more discussion of Clegg means keeping him out in public more, time to examine policy, well actually we did quiet well on immigration, only people who thought it was the most important issue scored Cameron better, as for prisons, well that’s what IDS is recommending. And for Europe, well we are committed to an in or out referendum and there is still a big difference between European superstate and being pro EU.
Hopefully we can keep this up and gain extra support, and even if we don’t I’m sure we will keep some people just from the first Leaders Debate, after all it would take a pretty huge story to break the Lib Dem surge stories.
But then “A week is a long time in politics.”
Posted on April 18, 2010
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