We’ve all crunched numbers wrongly and had to backtrack. Embarrassing as it is, sometimes there is nothing to be done but bite the bullet, hold your hands up, make a clean breast of it, turn over a new leaf, dust yourself off and wake up and smell the backbench rebellion.

So when it emerged that our rash promise of a puppy for every new reader had seriously alienated our core “traditional” readership, we knew what we had to do. Yes, we had to lift cute puppy pictures from all over the internet and use them as a bribe, even though those who already have cute puppy pictures will derive extra benefit from the exercise over the puppy-deprived. It’s a tough decision, but someone had to make it.

Simplicity itself?

It is interesting (to within an order of magnitude; when you’re at work; and it’s a slow Facebook day) to consider the professional response to Labour’s 10p blunder. Suggestions on this forum ranged from “restoring the 10p band and cutting benefits” to the solution eventually adopted.

Professional opinion is pretty much universal that the whole move was daft, a disgrace etc. In particular, there is a healthy scorn for the notion which Darling, darling! has successful palmed off on laypeople (ooh, you weirdos), that losing the 10p rate is somehow a giant leap forward in “simplification”. Any adviser will tell you that a single, immobile universal tax band on income with no exceptions or optional extras ranks as one of the simplest tax measures imaginable (then they’ll charge you £550+VAT).

Particularly galling to me was Darling, darling!’s repeated weaselly insistence that one “cannot just unpick” a Budget when it is precisely as unpickable as any other bill on its Third Reading (which I concede may not be very unpickable at all; the point is there’s nothing special about tax legislation). Again, he’s relying on lay unfamiliarity here. The bit of legislation that says the personal allowance shall be £x, the starting rate shall be 10p, the basic rate shall be 22p, the higher rate shall be 40p etc etc says… well, pretty much that. And every month thousands and thousands of payroll agents up and down the country go into their payroll software and implement what the legislation says.

Pay As You Earn tax is a system which is, on the whole, foolproof and immune to abuse. There’s really nothing mystical about changing the rates, nor is there anything profoundly simplifying in doing so. It’s the work of five minutes and one crazed junior treasury minister with a blank piece of Statutory Instrument headed notepaper and a pen, and after that they never have to think about it again.

It’s not the income tax bands that make tax complicated. Not even near. It’s the reliefs, the exceptions, the oddballs, the (nasty word approaching) loopholes, most commonly found in capital gains tax, corporation tax and inheritance tax and rarely sighted anywhere near your common or garden PAYE income tax, that make up the complications.

However, it was clearly in Darling, darling!’s interest to suggest that the whole process was vastly more complicated than it actually is, because that bought him time to negotiate the borrowing of the £2.7bn. What he really meant by claiming that it’s difficult to unpick a budget is that he can’t just palm off the cost on another group of taxpayers after the main budget debate has been and gone; he has to get more funding from outside instead. Good to know that Labour still shrinks from that much open tyranny.

In fact, never mind the complication, it’s still in his interest to pretend the whole thing was just a ghastly mistake (it was a Big Fat Lie; there is no way it could have been anything else; a junior tax assistant could have spotted the problem, given the figures on earnings and tax credit take-up). He’s not just blinking with terror like a rabbit in the glare of The Great Jon Snow because he’s had to make a U-turn. He’s blinking because he’s still trying to hide just how disgraceful the whole thing is. We’re treating this as the crisis point for Labour over the 10p tax affair when in fact this is the home straight. They’ve nearly got away with a shocking piece of straightforward deception.

That goldarned two-party consensus again

Sadly for the British people (not a phrase I care to use very often because it makes me queasy, as if I’ve eaten a big lardy slice of Tory Pie) the official opposition are in cahoots with Darling, darling! on this. It’s in Gorgeous Georgina Osbourne’s interest to make the whole thing sound far more complicated than it is as well, because he doesn’t understand a single bloody word of it.

This is why he keeps uttering mystical pronouncements such as ”The cupboard is bare” and “They didn’t mend the roof when the sun was shining” like some exceptionally mundane sybil. I’m listening out for when he starts saying “They didn’t tie the giraffe up in time and now the hamster’s mother has outgrown the chocolate undergarments” because then we’ll know he’s getting overconfident.

And of course, even if Gorgeous Georgina wasn’t the dunce of the Tory front bench, the Tories still need to maintain the illusion of complexity because they don’t want to commit themselves to any spending plans. One of the easiest ways to avoid this is to pretend that taxing and spending is a great alternative universe of Mystic Numbers Whose Wot We Cannot Possibly Know Until You Have Voted Us Back Into Power Where We Deserve To Be AHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!! ahem, ahem, sorry, and that it would be totally impossible to, say, assemble the basic toolkit of a calculator and the back of an envelope and start jotting some possibilities down.

This is politically clever because everyone believes them - I’ve even heard this touted as a Tory strength. I’ve heard it seriously suggested that they can’t do anything until they’ve “got in and seen exactly what kind of mess everything is in”, as if the economy is run out of a bunch of A5 cashbooks that Gordon Brown keeps locked in his kitchen drawer rather than a national system open to constant public scrutiny. So, politically clever, but economically and democratically grossly irresponsible, and underlines their sheer unashamed power lust.

The alternative, should any total cretin enquiring mind think I’m being a bit harsh on the Tories, is that Gorgeous Georgina really is that stupid. I am indebted to Daddy Richard for the knowledge that GG receives, every week, a Treasury Briefing. This briefing would enable him, at the whirl of a spreadsheet, to build a whole new quantified tax package, and know where every pound of revenue was coming from, and in what proportion. Tomorrow.

It wouldn’t tell him about outcomes of course; all the precautionary impact studies would remain to be taken. But the groundwork is there any time he cares to pluck it out of the air. Maybe he’s been guiltily stuffing his weekly Treasury Briefing down the back of the sofa for the last few years. Come to think of it, isn’t his little patch of the Tory front bench looking a bit… bulky?

The solution

Bad news if you’ve been mollified by Darling, darling!’s announcement, because here’s the dirty little truth: he’s pulled the same trick on you again. Essentially, Gordon Brown’s great miscalculation in his last budget as Chancellor, which may yet be the undoing of him in his first election as Prime Minister, was to think that middle earners would be so chuffed with their 2p basic rate cut that they would ignore the fact that it was stripped off the backs of the low earners.

Well, rather than spending his extra borrowing on, say, reinstating the 10p band, Darling, darling! has now spent £2.7bn on a rise in the personal allowance which still leaves earners of between £6,000 and £12,500 worse off if they’re not on tax credits and also has the rather neat effect of benefitting those middle income net gainers from the Budget still further. £120 further, as he didn’t tire of saying on R4 this morning.

I’m not saying raising the personal allowance isn’t a totally admirable goal, but his emphasis on helping middle income hardworking families facing rising fuel and food bills blah-blah-please-love-me is so strong that it’s perfectly obvious that helping NMW workers isn’t the main agenda.

As the Low Incomes Tax Reform Group unhappily puts it,

We welcome the Chancellor’s announcement that he will aim to compensate some 10% losers by raising the basic personal allowance for the under-65s. Nevertheless, we have significant reservations.

Although it is churlish to be unhappy about a strategy (raising personal allowances) that we would normally welcome, we cannot let pass the fact that it is some of the very poorest who still lose out.

Yes, this is another middle class bribe, I’m afraid. As is this:

I see that Boycie, commenting on his Lib Dem Voice piece, would rather like it if we shot Mad Nad full of holes on account of the fact that she is a twisted lying stupid fundamentalist harpy who disgraces politics, women and, indeed, stupid liars, fundamentalists and harpies, and then asked David Cameron what he was gonna do about it, punk.

I concur, so I am delighted to point you towards my occasional bunk-up over at Liberal Conspiracy where Sunny Hundal, Unity, Tim Ireland and The Gang are part way through Mad Nad Week the launch of the Coalition for Choice campaign. Watch out in particular for the fun Tory troll who evidently believes that blogs have to be “run and funded” - makes you wonder how anything ever gets done in the right-wing blogosphere if those are the parameters they assume necessary for the act of sounding off into cyberspace.

A mystery was unveiled at the bloggers’ interview with the Cleggster last week, which has been most excellently written up in full by That Elephant thus leaving me free to flit over the surface in dilettantish fashion.

We were talking about the national media, specifically about how they won’t unkink their anuses sufficiently to actually discuss Liberal Democrat policy, principles or progress in the national consciousness in case they copiously shit themselves with terror (I am paraphrasing, obviously) at the idea that there may be life outside the two-party consensus.

Clegg’s approach, with which I would guess we all concur, albeit with the odd bit of heartening militancy, is simply to find ways round them. The country is full of local newspapers whose reportage people trust far more than the nationals, and whose news editors are only too pleased to bag a briefing with a national political figure. It’s also full of underused town halls for Nick to “beetle around” answering questions at public meetings to which the national media are not invited. And most of all it’s full of real people who only read a national newspaper on a Sunday if at all. Sooner or later, he says, the media will have to take notice of us because we’ll be too big and successful to ignore. And we’ll have done it without them. 

The idea that it’s the national media who are in crisis has a ring of truth about it. Why else would we upset some of them so much? It strikes me that the inexorable rise of the Liberal Democrats is the acid test for the survival of the old-style national media machine. Like quitting smoking the experience is much harder than it looks for them. They need to quit the Two Party Consensus. When and if they admit that the Lib Dems are, er, what they say they are, to wit a national political party, they will have overcome a major psychological hurdle and demonstrated a proper grasp of the national scene. Until then, they just look increasingly bloody silly, covering themselves with the political equivalent of nicotine plasters, scuttling guiltily down the alley for a furtive briefing session with Iain Dale, adopting ever greater contortions to avoid mentioning the fact that the Lib Dems are now pretty obviously in the big time.

The reason this puts them in crisis is that they’re relying on a USP which is now outmoded, and that much they do understand. Clegg told us how he gets his news, it’s just like I do, and it’s not by Reading A Newspaper. He “magpies” it (a rather natty verb, new on me, incorporating elements of both cherry-picking and winging it; use it in a sentence this week why don’t you) from a daily email update that summarises all the coverage of top stories across all the newspapers, from bits and pieces people send him, from specialist journals or magazines, from a glance at the ticker tape. Part of the traditional print media’s successful evolution over the past decade has been the development of news delivery paths that serve that magpie instinct.

But over the next decade or so that will make bugger-all difference if they continue to print - virtually or on paper - stuff that people are ever-decreasingly interested in reading because it bears no relation to their own lives or the lives of their communities. Despite all the bollocks hanging off national media websites, the blogs, comment columns, and other interactive danglers, the message being peddled is the same as it has been for twenty years. Fifty years, even. Newspapers, virtual and papery, are still written as if it’s 1951, when everybody except the Trots, the illegally ballotted budgerigars and those who expired with postwar boredom on the way to the polling station voted for Labour and the Tories (98% was it?), as against 68% in 2005.

Now to the mystery. Apparently, and notwithstanding his wise injunction that there is no point in our getting overly upset about any of this, Clegg had a good rant at the editorial team of a national newspaper not long ago. He pointed out that their politics coverage was totally and utterly incomprehensible to, for example, the constituents of Sheffield Hallam, who voted out their last Tory in the dark ages and perceive the whole question of the ”two horse race” entirely differently from the national media. He rattled off to us, probably to them as well, the list of cities across the north controlled by the Lib Dems - Liverpool, Newcastle, Sheffield, Grimsby, Hull. Major British population centres where the Liberal Democrats are the ruling party. They’re just not places the media live. They are satellites of unreality to your average political editor, fiddly little anomalous departures from a norm that has remained fixed in Fleet Street perception for half a century.

So which newspaper was on the wrong end of the Clegg effect? I’ve been wondering ever since and today I wonder if I found the answer. It has been pretty clear since December that the national media and its two-party acolytes are absolutely panting to say that Clegg isn’t a success, and they’re being continuously thwarted by the fact that the only real blunder he’s made so far has been in mismanaging the Europe vote (note I say mismanaging; the position itself still looks fair enough from the People’s Republic). But even in an atmosphere of increasing desperation to score any sort of meaningful hit on Clegg, this piece of trying it on by Sam Coates is really stunningly trivial:

Sir Menzies Campbell was always tortured over whether he should use the “Sir” in official Liberal Democrat literature after he became leader.

Ah, ze old compare-to-previous-leader trick, eh? What juicy revelation will follow? Has Clegg punished a local exec member for not standing up when he entered a room? Demanded that he be referred to as The Anointed One in internal memos? Shot a flunkey for underboiling his morning egg? Read on, I can hardly bear it.

So it is nothing short of hilarious that Nick Clegg has decided to adopt the styling “The Rt Hon Nick Clegg MP” in his official literature. It appears in his introduction to the new “City Manifesto” (not yet online, but page 2 when it appears).

Really? “Nothing short of hilarious”? Are you sure, Sam? Laughs must be in damn short supply at Red Box Blog Towers. I mean, it’s not even a cheap hit. It’s a flag popping out of the end of a gun with “BANG!” written on it, and I would protest that far from its merely being cheap you couldn’t pay someone to administer it, except that the Times obviously did. I know it’s only a blog and not a real article, but jeez. How long before I read an editorial entitled “Nick smells”, followed up by a point-by-point dissection from Mister Dale and a death-knell-of-the-Lib-Dems-because-Nick-smells opinion piece from Simon Heffer?

So it looks like that little mystery is cleared up.

From today’s Guardian:

Police should be harassing badly behaved youths by openly filming them and hounding them at home to make their lives as uncomfortable as possible, the home secretary will say today.

The crime initiative is part of a government strategy to win back voters by proposing more radical approaches to tackling deep seated problems.

In a speech in London the home secretary, Jacqui Smith, will acknowledge that the number of antisocial behaviour orders being issued is falling, but will argue that there has been a shift to the use of parental orders instead.

As part of the crackdown on bad behaviour, she will urge police forces across the country to follow the example of Essex police, who have mounted four-day “frame and shame” operations by filming and repeatedly stopping identified persistent offenders on problem estates.

The programme in Essex has been successful, even though it may raise human rights issues about such tough tactics, especially if those harassed by the police have not been found guilty of any criminal offence.

Smith will say: “There is no let-up in tackling antisocial behaviour. We know that getting in early to stop troublemakers works, but I want stronger action to deal with persistent offenders. I want police and local agencies to focus on them by giving them a taste of their own medicine: daily visits, repeated warnings and relentless filming of offenders to create an environment where there is nowhere to hide.

“There can be no excuse for inaction while people still fear for the safety of the streets and estates where they live. We will do more to protect them. We all need to sharpen our resolve to tackle both the symptoms and the causes of antisocial behaviour.”

The government has been accused by the Conservatives of going soft on its previous “respect” agenda, closing down its respect unit and placing a new emphasis on youth clubs and play.

Read the whole sorry thing here.

An interesting postscript to the debate we’ve been having on my last exposition of Elementary Logic. I’ve no particularly bitter axe to grind here because I didn’t vote for Boris, but I am nonetheless enraged by the almost instantaneous discovery that he’s a rubbish liberal.

It appears Bojo and David Cameron are of one mind* on the link between petty crime and serious crime. Bojo has made his first policy announcement, and yes, it’s “Ban More Fun”. We’re no longer allowed to drink on the tube, or we’ll get it confiscated from our little mits by the fun police.

I firmly believe that if we drive out so-called minor crime then we will be able to get a firm grip on more serious crime. That’s why from 1 June the drinking of alcohol will be banned from the tube, tram, bus, and Docklands Light Railway.

You may well be thinking, haaaang on. Drinking in public isn’t actually itself a crime, is it? Well, you’d be wrong. Traditionally, public order legislation has only given police the power to make arrests for actual drunkenness, and/or disturbance of public order. That was before NuLab. As of 2001 it became possible, under the Criminal Justice and Police Act of that year, for local authorities to designate public places as alcohol free zones, and after that the police can issue on-the-spot fines to those who infringe the zone.

Thus, drinking becomes a crime. Cripes! Just as well NuLab passed that particular intrusive mumsyish measure, eh, Boris? Will these cretins ever realise that they’re helter-skeltering together down a tight little blue-and-red spiral of ever-decreasing policy difference? Remember the wisdom of The Thick Of It:

She doesn’t just think inside the box, she’s built another box inside it and she’s doing all her thinking in there…

* Dave Monday to Wednesday, Boris Thursday and Friday, and the brain gets the weekend off.

We have been for tea and sticky buns in the tippety-toppety corner of the House of Commons (up in the guttering just by the gargoyles) with the Cleggster again. This event was brought to us courtesy of the awesome organisational powers of Millennium Elephant (very impressive for a fluffy toy) and I’m going to write up most of our very enjoyable chat tomorrow (they’re getting more informal the better we get at them, which is pleasing). But I’ll make one note now on Nick Clegg’s assessment of David Cameron, in the light of this unexpected treat in the Times.

Well, Nick’s not impressed. More in sorrow than in anger, perhaps - this is allegedly the Prime Minister in waiting, after all. It’s rather reassuring to hear at first hand that the man one thinks of as being a 2-dimensional PR tosser, constrained from formulating decent policy by both his party and his own daft cocksureness, also comes across much like that in real life.

It’s also interesting to hear a leader thoughtfully dissect another man’s failings away from the bearpit of PMQs. Brown and Cameron seem to take the opposite stance - scream and jabber at each other like outraged teenagers (with apologies to teenagers everywhere) in the House but largely decline to comment on each other when they’re having lunch with the press, preferring to maintain the communal delusion that the two big parties actually still stand for two opposing “ideologies” and it is the method, and not the man, that will deliver the [insert suitable unarguable warm fuzzy word here] Britain needs.

Clegg dispatched Cameron as follows. On civil liberties? Cameron is Janus-faced - against ID cards but he wants to scrap the Human Rights Act? On foreign policy? Living in the wrong decade. On tax? Taking a tremendous risk by foregrounding the 10p band because sooner or later people are going to realise that he has no alternative policy. He has, of course, stated that he will restore the 10p band, but given that other spending commitments are being reined in with Scroogelike insistence by Shouty Plonker HQ, my suspicion is that they’re desperately hoping no-one asks them where the money will come from, and why, if they’re able to do this, they can’t promise to cut taxes across the board.

Our own 10p commitment, of course, is costed and has been for nine months; the only fault I could find with Nick’s performance at PMQs today was that he missed a golden opportunity, when Brown claimed that the Liberal [sic] party had no plans to reinstate the 10p band, to reply OH YES WE DO! Except we’d make it a 0p BAND! Here’s the costed summary - put that in your calculator and smoke it! Tcoh, why won’t he see sense and let me script his questions? Nick holds what he calls an old-fashioned belief that “ideas will out”. So do I, and I don’t think it’s old-fashioned, I think it’s so old that it’s on the cusp of becoming new again - although I could wish we were milking it a little more in our national campaigns (of which more tomorrow).

Nick also agreed with Laurence Boyce, whose question had prompted the discussion, that Cameron will be in dangerous waters with his party the moment he shows any sign of not being able to deliver. Even if we can’t probe the deep divisions in the Conservative party and expose the wormy reality behind that fluffy looking blue oak tree, it will all come out in the wash sooner or later. The loopier element of the Tories tolerate Cameron because they know in their barking heart of barking hearts that only he can make them palatable to the electorate. But they won’t maintain that truce for very long if he starts failing to fulfil his only purpose. They’ll kick him if he falters, and they’ll also kick him if they’re in a tight spot - like government, for example?

Nick also had an interesting reading of Cameron’s comments following their electoral successes on Thursday - he reckons Their Dave sees the electoral success as a double-edged sword, because it has lulled the old guard of the Tories into thinking they don’t have to change or make any further effort of any kind for government to simply fall back into their lap.

And lo! from the Times sketch comes this superb Davism which seems to underline everything Nick set out tonight about cockiness, about lack of substance and about being out of touch:

Yes, I am wealthy. I have a very well-paid job and so does my wife. But I drive my own car, I fill it up at the pumps and when diesel hits 121.9p, which I paid outside Chipping Norton a couple of weeks ago, it really struck me that this whole tank is costing me £10 to £15 more than previously.

Ironic really. Another part of our discussion focussed on how the media were never, ever going to like us and the best we can do is ignore them and reach the electorate in other ways.  Which really means we ought to take this unusual bit of Dave-bashing with a pinch of salt as well. But make hay while the Sun shines, I say.

In the days running up to the local elections there was an excellent reminder, if it were needed, that Tory logic is very much of the push-me-pull-you* variety.

Their Dave was around and about in Manchester (a digression: did anyone else pick up on the cringeworthy Cathy Newman segment on C4 news when Their Dave, on being asked to speculate on how the elections would go for the Tories ”in his wildest dreams?” replied “Well, hur-hur, not all my wildest dreams are about local elections, Cathy.” Hgaggaaaaaaaah! Gnnnaaaaaaah! Ick! Gn! Make it go away!) busy putting paid to the totally unfair perception (perish the thought!) that he was a Notting Hill namby-pamby. Having thus reassured the denizens, he contined to discuss local problems and suggest solutions.

People are desperately worried about crime, about antisocial behaviour, about what is happening on our streets. Conservative councils will clear your streets and have a zero tolerance policy because we know that clean streets are safe streets… If you get rid of the litter and the graffiti you can get rid of the vandalism and the yobbery that spoils so many of our town and city centres

I would, in all seriousness** welcome any reading Tory who wants to have a go at explaining this chain of causality. Because, I mean, what? Picking up litter will solve all the problems of disaffected youth? Cleaning graffiti off walls will actually lower rates of mugging and burglary? Try as Dave might to disassociate himself from the charge of being a Notting Hill lightweight, it betrays itself in his thinking. The pretty wedding cake streets of Notting Hill are of course extremely clean and extremely safe, but those two mutually exclusive facts proceed from a third fact - they’re rich. Only someone totally wrapped up in their culture could fail to appreciate this as a root cause.

What escapes Their Dave at some quite fundamental level, I reckon, is that the culprits actually live in these areas. Perhaps he thinks they get bussed in at night from some out-of-town anti-social behaviour megastore? As long as certain factors drive people to what Labour has taught us to call, without even mid-air quotation marks any more, anti-social behaviour, they will practise it, on this wall or the next. But the Tory solution recognises no such painfully obvious reality. Move’em on, bang’em up, kick’em out, and Surrey house prices and Victoria sponge competitions will surely follow.

It’s faintly unnerving, how certain they are about this sort of thing on the basis of no evidence whatsoever. You know how nutters think with total seriousness that, say, traffic lights are causing rain to fall and Theresa May is controlling them through the television set? (They’re quite wrong about this, of course; it’s Jacqui Smith). To witness Tory policy-making in action is often like watching a whole bunch of them wearing suits and talking to journalists. One of them would just be a lone nutter, but collectively their skewed world-view has a spurious mass-certitude about it. They really don’t see why the whole world can’t be just like Notting Hill.

* In the sense that it tries to go in two directions as if they were one direction, rather than in the sense that it has two heads, is covered in fur and goes around braying a lot…

** Though not so serious that I won’t throw custard pies at you and go “ner-ner-ner, you’ve gone all YELLOW!”

I see that Jo A has womanfully collated a list of fretful blogging reactions to our London results thus saving me a lot of gloomy scrolling. I hope opposition bloggers are watching this. The London results are dire for the Lib Dems, and we are all saying so - is it at all possible that you might give us an incy-wincy break and believe us when we also say the the country-wide results were really rather good?

Fairly bloody, ain’t it - 11% of the assembly vote, less than 10% of the mayoral vote. No spinning that one. But I fall somewhere between the two positions being demonstrated on the LDV thread - self-critical despair on the one hand and ultra-philosophical acceptance of the roundabout of political life on the other.

It is pretty dire, but there is an explanation, and it’s not simply that Brian got squeezed by two media giants, although that’s part of it. Paul Walter points out that as a liberal party we can hardly start questioning the electorate for turning out in high numbers - up to 50% in some boroughs - with the “wrong” kind of votes. That’s what Labour does when voters don’t show due appreciation of its Glorious Wisdom. As far as that goes I agree. But I do have an inkling about which bits of the electorate constituted that very high turnout across London, and how that might have affected our vote share.

On Thursday I directed someone to the polling station and asked them how they were going to vote (keeping my clipboard well out of sight, of course). “Oh Ken, I think,” she said. Well, that was a waste of time, wasn’t it. But it wasn’t until several hours afterwards that I realised what she meant by this - she didn’t really have much notion that any other elections were happening at all. Once she got in there, on being presented with not one bit of paper, but three, she probably filled in the others as well (and, I like to think, gave us a shout on the Assembly in thanks for the terribly nice and helpful woman who directed her to the polling station).

Normally, London Assembly elections are associated with the mayoral election - they don’t take place in its media-mighty shadow, like they did this time. Most people reading the London Metro of a morning could be forgiven for thinking that a mayoral election was the only thing happening on 1 May in the whole country, let alone London. So as far as they were concerned, they were voting for a London mayor only. And Brian was so obviously on the squeeze that many of the 12-14% or so of polled Londoners who said they would give him first preference stayed at home on 1st May. With the result that our Assembly vote share went down as well, because many of the people who wanted to give Brian first preference would probably have voted Lib Dem on the Assembly ballot papers too.

Anecdotal, yes, but it accounts for our low figures without excusing them (we didn’t work hard enough to get people out to vote, presumably), and also explains why the Green vote share remained contrastingly buoyant, and in the mayoral results crept up one point from the steady 2% held throughout the contest. The Green voters never expected their candidate to be a mayoral front-runner. They voted on 1 May to (continue to) prove a point, not in the hope of challenging the top two.

It strikes me that we’re in a sort of puberty stage of political parties (no, really, stay with me). We’re too big and successful now to be regarded as the plucky little underdog, and attract the grumpy protest vote. That role now belongs to the Greens. People don’t see us as anti-establishment any more, purely by dint of our size and vote share, and the fact that they’ve decided to see our leader as an establishment leader who doesn’t “live up” to establishment standards, rather than the oddball anti-establishment leader he actually is, good teeth and an enthusiasm for hiking and tennis notwithstanding. Our size and popularity attracts the other parties’ fear, hence all the ludicrous unfairness and name-calling on the Beeb and throughout the media.

But, while we’re now definitely in the secondary school playground, we’re not strong enough to challenge the big boys, who bully us in the apparent hope that we’ll dwindle and lose heart. We’re in a peculiarly hellish sort of limbo, neither one thing or the other. Presumably the only thing to do when confronted with a set of results like this is to stick with it, not let the bastards grind us down and keep applying the clearasil. No, I have no idea how that translates into an actual strategy, wot am I, Lawd Rennard?

Having stormed City Hall and taken over the BBC, we in the People’s Republic are looking forward to a swift descent back to anonymity, hopefully with some new loyal citizens (a puppy for every new reader!). Already the stats graph has stopped shaking like a maxed-out Geiger counter, which is actually quite a relief. We are not quite sure we can take ourselves seriously as a blogging commentator. Somehow it was all a great deal simpler in the good old days when we were wittering on about Anglo-Norman linguistics, the distressing fall-out from the Incident With The Broken Chair or tax, tax and a little more tax, with occasionally the odd mention of the Liberal Democrats.

But credit to the Beeb for contributing to the flossy excitement of political blogging. I suppose. Like most online innovation, the huge amount of white noise surrounding political blogging will probably resolve itself into a couple of clear signals a few years down the line. The majority of ideas, innovations, participation exercises, collaborations, interactive experiments, publicity paraphernalia and other self-regarding bollocks produced by the political parties and those who lobby for them will become dead wood - as, of course, will the majority of blogs and hub-sites operating now, including quite probably this one. One or two interesting and useful contributions to the field of political behaviour will remain.

Meanwhile, a little story about New Media And Old that may reassure us in the crazy boom years. Mr PikeBishop is a name bloggers will know (self-absorbed? nous?). For anyone who doesn’t keep their intellect wrapped around their own sphinctre, his real name is Frank Fisher. Frank was an opinionated crotchety libertarian with a acid-sharp knack of cutting people’s heads clean off in conversation, and a tendency to object to all categorisations including this one. One day, he discovered Comment is Free and a whole new world opened up. Suddenly there were hundreds of terminally stupid people ripe for a neck-tickle with a blunt axe! He didn’t even have to leave the house and go out looking for arguments at bus stops! Frank became Mr PikeBishop, and administered merciless opinionated crotchety libertarian medicine across the political spectrum.

Now, the Guardian ancien regime in those days still believed that its readers were sitting cross-legged at the foot of its Tree of Ineffable Wisdom and gazing up into the boughs with an expression of starlit wonder. They were somewhat disconcerted to discover that a real, live, breathing audience with opinions and pet topics of its own existed on the other end of the newspaper distribution chain saying things like “This is shit, this is”, and the person of Mr PikeBishop represented this alarming new fact so well that he won the popular vote Big Blogger competition of 2006, presumably to the organ’s total dismay.

Mr PikeBishop single-handedly gives the lie to the general assumption (that of, you know, The Wizards) that political blogging and online comment is a Macbook-glossy world of young hipsters with soft-yet-cool brains ready to receive the imprint of this or that party allegiance. Mostly it’s just the same crusty, hairy, peculiar blighters who were already arguing about politics in pubs or at bus-stops, ’cept with a computer in front of them.

You may gather from all this that I have a sneaking admiration for Mr PikeBishop, as most CiFers do, even the ones still carrying their heads around in a tupperware box. So imagine my delight on election day when I see this post from Mr PB on a particularly foaming anti-Boris piece from Zoe Williams:

Well I wasn’t going to vote today - not being in the Smoke and not having anyone to vote for - and as usual was going to draw a cock on my ballot paper, this time with “Gordon Brown” written along the shaft, but Zoe, you have inspired me. It would only take a 3% swing to the crappy Libdems to unseat the Labour councillors who hold my ward; obviously I’m no libdem, but I saw one of their candidates the other day, posting materials on a sunday morning, he at least looked keen and the thing is… I now realise I have a reason to vote. So Zoe, I shall be voting libdem at around 6 this evening, on my way home from work, just to annoy you.

Chin chin

Mr PB, Mr PB! I said. Thank you!

Don’t thank me, he said, because I hate you and everything you stand for.

Well, yes. Sadly, I fear this is the last time we’re going to attract Mr PikeBishop’s cock drawing vote. Particularly if he sees I’ve screwed a blog post out of it. But the point is, old-fashioned Rennardism scored a tiny babystep victory here.

Part of the reason Labour tanked on Thursday is because, anecdotally, they’ve lost their activist base. The leaflet-pushers and door-knockers are either pissed off after ten years of being ignored by the central party, horrified by policies like the axing of the 10p band which appear to undercut everything they believe in, or they’ve gone on to better things (and lost them). The kind of attrition that has worked itself out in the cabinet since 1997 leaving us under the yoke of the present sorry bunch of losers is just as applicable at the bottom of the hierarchy - and a hierarchy is exactly what it is. I’m not an uncritical fan of leafletting, despite actually rather enjoying the process itself. But a keen sprig with a bunch of leaflets in the right place at the right time clearly worked its magic on Mr PB.

However, lest the leaflet fanciers among us get too complacent we should remember it can also go horribly wrong, as this exclusive photograph taken in Picton ward in Liverpool at 7am on Thursday morning demonstrates:

It appears that the Labour activist who got there before our lot ignored the warning on the upper notice, with the resultant crucifxion as shown on the lower notice.

We, er, won Picton.

14.00

I’ll bow to your wisdom, commenters, and carry on with this post, since you are. Hey, I might never bother creating a new post again.

First, apple lodges for the blogging hiatus in the wee hours, I have no particular excuse to offer other than a corresponding hiatus in my energy levels, despite the “finger food” (always a sinister phrase), and a slow-up in the flow of information. Had I been more myself (i.e., blogging while wrapped in a blanket and eating a chocolate bar for breakfast, like wot I am now doing) I would have churned out some more reflective stuff in that period. That’s what you get when you put rank amateurs like me on the tellybox.

I am, however hugely chuffed about your contributions, and I’m sorry I couldn’t mention more of them (the whole experience was a lot more fraught than it was probably made to look by the lovely Emily M) but checking in on this thread every now and then helped keep me sane. Sincere apologies to Adrian Sanders (I am particularly pleased about the Exeter majority, it being a place dear to my heart) and Bernard Salmon whose extremely valuable comments got stuck in spam and I only released them at 4am this morning. Annoying, I would obviously have made a lot more of them. That’s bloggin’.

We’ve got Sheffield! Just seen it come up on the Beeb’s tickertape. Re Liverpoo-el, on reflection I could probably have done without that defection - rather as a couple of people below have said. Whatever the details were, it’s going to be milked for all it’s worth by the (Labour mouthpiece) Liverpool Echo over the next year. We made a great fight of it anyway - one seat off a majority in Labour’s key target seat? I’d have been happy with that.

But then, we’re not Liverpool Lib Dems. I can’t imagine how frustrating it must be to see all your ongoing plans and work go up in smoke, especially in the name of “No Overall Control”. I rather trust that they had some good reasons for seeking a cobbled together majority. It may, {she hoped}, be that they’re on the verge of cracking the finance problem (which has, basically, arisen because of the City of Culture thing; anything like that is always going to be an expensive fiasco whatever the cultural benefits, and the ruling party is always going to get it in the neck). If they can turn things around over the next year, they’ll have deserved their relative success.

With 129 official results in it’s fairly certain we’ll finish in the low positives. I said yesterday I’d have been disappointed with less than 25% of the vote share, so our performance is solid from my point of view. Little to add to the excellent analysis at 4am this morning (no, really) by Andy H, in fact. Not at all surprised to see the Beeb et al insisting it’s a failure. Incidentally, Iain D (what a treasure trove of insider information that man is) mentioned to me that people generally get hit over the head with a big stick by the Beeb for “breaking the confidentiality of rehearsals” which was quite blatantly what I did for CiF yesterday. I will let you know if any sharp blows to the head occur. Happily, James Graham has now taken the nuttily hate-filled anti Lib Dem commenters off my hands over there. It really does puzzle me, the maniacal pin-sticking type vitriol that gets poured over us on CiF. It feels like wandering into the wrong paper. Why are they so upset?

In other nutter news, I see that Luke Akehurst’s fake blog stalker person has - if you can believe this - been into my Facebook account (innocently open to mostcomers), and copied a photo of me pretending to be Captain Jack Sparrow in the Balkans last year into his blog, and derived a number of less-than-sophisticated nautical metaphors therefrom. Hasn’t had the decency to link to me, sadly, and that compliment I hereby return.

Now, I really must call my mother.

2ND MAY

03.41

Liverpool… what can I say? Let joy be unconfined. Hopefully about to have a good ol’ fight with Luke about it on air.

Incidentally, someone on Iain’s blog earlier complained that Luke and I hadn’t linked to Iain tonight whereas he had linked to us. So here we are:

Luke!

Iain!

I do find the notion that we need to link to Iain rather quaint and charming. My hit rate today, my highest ever, has been less than a tenth of Ian’s on a normal day.

Well, the plug has been pulled and the wine is flowing. A good night. Until tomorrow!

02.49

Just managed to catch a clip of Ringmeister Jeremy Vine and his tragic animation. Now, I’m all for fun and frolics on political programmes. Well, actually, I’m not. But for the love of dear god. With the best will in the world - 25%, four points up on our poll position, we’ve overtaken Labour, we’re the second party in the country… and it’s a POOR PERFORMANCE? Much as I predicted earlier today. Ridiculous.

01.23

The spring rolls are congealed, the lip gloss has all but worn off, but give me more!

Great news!!! With multiple exclamation marks!!! We’ve held Eastleigh!!!

Er. No, not a great surprise, it being Chris Huhne’s seat an’ all. But we have apparently liquidated the last Tory from the council.

Curioser and curioser. We’ve lost three seats to Labour in Bolton… but made them up against the Tories in Stratford. Has the country up-ended itself? The canard about Tory resurgence in the south is now well and truly a dead duck.

My information here at City Hall (very useful having a whole press team hanging around nearby chatting) is that we’ll finish AHEAD of Labour. The figure 27% is being bandied about…

Snapshot: Iain is quoting yet another lascivious Tory commenter from his blog slurping at Emily and/or Clemency. Luke’s blog meanwhile is hosting an argument about George Galloway and the Iraq war. Kind of appropriate in both cases really.

00.45am Harmony in the South-West. Aaaah.

Mr Iain tells me there are two Con gains from Labour in Exeter which puts all three of us on a lovely even 12 seats apiece. Bad, though again not unexpected, news from Pendle - one Con gain from us there. Like Liverpool, it was always going to be a toughie.

At this point I am cautiously extremely happy. The official Beeb position is we’re net one councillor up after eighteen declarations (i.e. about an hour ago), and I haven’t heard anything from my little channels which varies that picture wildly. Given that we would be happy to lose anything under a hundred seats on the back of a great performance in 2004, it’s All Going According to Plan. Not all bad news in Liverpool though - we’re making gains in nearby Knowsley which has been hardcore Labour since the dawn of time. We’ve also taken a ward from Labour in Salford.

00.30am More from the gentle south

Lib Dems are now predicting a majority in Cheltenham (currently even stevens with the Tories) and the Woking news appears hopeful - more to follow.

The political internet continues to explode with indignation at the antics of Jeremy Vine. Let’s see if we can’t stick it to him an’ his graphics next camera shot we get…

00.24am Bizarre result of the night

The Tories hold Broxbourne, as expected, but Labour gain one seat from them to reach a grand total of 3 councillors. Broxbourne? In the middle of Hertfordshire? The SOUTH? What in the name of Champion the Wonder Horse is going on?

00.17am Just in from St Albans

We’re looking good, yellow people. Three wards held and one gain from Labour (only eight Labour councillors there to start with, so a relatively easy mop-up job). Full control beckons.

In other news, I hear one of Guido’s commenters says I look “quite tasty”. Of such august observations does political blogging consist. Just as well I have Iain here to safeguard my virtue.

00.06am Wonderful Winchester and Woeful Wiverpool

Bad is the news from Liverpool just now. Labour have taken three of our seats and we’ve lost another to one of the minor parties. Not wholly unexpected - Labour have thrown everything at Liverpool. More than a couple more losses and I’ll be worried.

But great news from Winchester - a Lib Dem hold, despite all the talk of Tory resurgence in the south east. Plainly the Dave deal has not been sealed.

11.59pm Tories romping away in the south, you say?

That’s what the papers keep telling me. Not at Sandgate in Folkestone & Hythe, it seems! The Lib Dems gain from the Conservatives with a vote share increased by 35.1%. Courtesy of, and congrats to, Tim Prater.

Poor Michael Portillo! No-one at the great big pretend BBC election party wants to talk to him. He’s tucked onto one of the supercool ergonomic sofas reading a book all by his little self…

11.44pm Early Tory gains…

Mr Iain is jubilant - the Tories have retained Tamworth and taken seats in Chorley and Swansea. I also learn from the estimable Mr Dale that the Boris staying on as MP for Henley story is “total rubbish” and I shouldn’t mention it on air or I shall live to regret it. Ooh, Iain, you tease! What do you think I should do, boys and girls?

Great Lib Dem news from Hull! We lost the council after a defection and needed one seat to retake control. And we’ve gained not one seat, but five…

11.01pm A question of milk… 

In the preparation for tonight we were all three asked, amongst other things, for our earliest political memory, and I chose Mrs Thatcher taking away my free school milk. Iain wondered how this could be. The original decision to stop school milk was made in the 1970s when Maggie was Ed Sec’y. But we did have free school milk at my primary school (c1983-1987) and it was taken away somewhere in the middle years. It tickles me to recall in this context that I lived in what was then the fifth safest Tory seat in the country (Epsom and Ewell). Did we healthy ruddy Tory children get extra calcium for the greater good?

Can anyone shed any light on this perplexing lactic mystery?

10.50pm Iain Dale-Luke Akehurst sandwich…

The Liberal Democrats are the centre of attention for once here on floor 9 at City Hall as I have managed to bag the central seat by the simple expedient of turning up early. Shock revelations already abound - Luke Akehurst only types with one finger! Overheard in make-up: ”so it’s 53-47 after second preferences”.  Nope, I don’t know which way round that was.

In further London news, there have been problems earlier in the day in several London boroughs with ballot paper illegalities, and Iain and Luke are talking across me right this moment about extraordinarily high turnouts across the city. 50% in Chingford and Wood Green, 49% in Hackney. Glad news. On the bus today, I directed a girl to the library, warning her it would be closed because it was the polling station. “I know,” she said, all wounded surprise, “I’m going to vote.” A warm glow! We rode on in companionable silence, perhaps the only two women under thirty in London to vote today… Any more out there?