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| The key to the Eastleigh byelection is forget Chris Huhne and think of Crewe | The key to the Eastleigh byelection is forget Chris Huhne and think of Crewe |
| (about 13 hours later) | |
| A candidate you can trust. That's what the Tory billboards in Eastleigh say, in bold letters over Maria Hutchings's smiling face: nudge, nudge, wink, wink, say no more of Chris Huhne. Whatever could they mean? | A candidate you can trust. That's what the Tory billboards in Eastleigh say, in bold letters over Maria Hutchings's smiling face: nudge, nudge, wink, wink, say no more of Chris Huhne. Whatever could they mean? |
| Some hope, you might think, of the good clean fight everyone's piously calling for in this byelection nobody wants. With Huhne fast becoming a caricature of everything people most hate about politicians, logic suggests his party – still floundering in national polls – should expect the mother of all drubbings. So what does it tell us that, against all the odds, the Liberal Democrats are the bookies' favourite to hold the seat? | Some hope, you might think, of the good clean fight everyone's piously calling for in this byelection nobody wants. With Huhne fast becoming a caricature of everything people most hate about politicians, logic suggests his party – still floundering in national polls – should expect the mother of all drubbings. So what does it tell us that, against all the odds, the Liberal Democrats are the bookies' favourite to hold the seat? |
| For a start, it suggests trust is not so much a trump card in Eastleigh as an irrelevance: unfairly, the very idea of a trustworthy MP is fast becoming an oxymoron. Voters aren't reeling at Huhne's downfall because many of them probably already take it for granted that politicians behave badly. So their MP lied: yes, and the pope is still Catholic. | For a start, it suggests trust is not so much a trump card in Eastleigh as an irrelevance: unfairly, the very idea of a trustworthy MP is fast becoming an oxymoron. Voters aren't reeling at Huhne's downfall because many of them probably already take it for granted that politicians behave badly. So their MP lied: yes, and the pope is still Catholic. |
| Meanwhile, the most striking statistic of the campaign so far is the pub quiz question offered by the academic Professor Philip Cowley. When was the last time the Liberal Democrats failed to hold a seat at a byelection? Answer: never. Their MPs tend to spend years chipping away at their seats before they win, getting under the skin of places in a way other parties don't, and once elected tend not to get lazy or complacent. | Meanwhile, the most striking statistic of the campaign so far is the pub quiz question offered by the academic Professor Philip Cowley. When was the last time the Liberal Democrats failed to hold a seat at a byelection? Answer: never. Their MPs tend to spend years chipping away at their seats before they win, getting under the skin of places in a way other parties don't, and once elected tend not to get lazy or complacent. |
| Then again, it's easy to excel at pavement politics when you don't have a day job in government, or any realistic prospect of one. What makes Eastleigh so interesting now is that it's a test of how absorption into the national, rather than local, game – with all the shoddy compromises that coalition requires – has changed the way Liberal Democrat MPs operate and changed their relationship with what used to be their people. Or it would be, if they weren't in such an unseemly rush to get it over with. | Then again, it's easy to excel at pavement politics when you don't have a day job in government, or any realistic prospect of one. What makes Eastleigh so interesting now is that it's a test of how absorption into the national, rather than local, game – with all the shoddy compromises that coalition requires – has changed the way Liberal Democrat MPs operate and changed their relationship with what used to be their people. Or it would be, if they weren't in such an unseemly rush to get it over with. |
| For David Cameron too, the sooner it's finished, arguably the better, since he's in even more of an awkward position than Nick Clegg. While failing to retake Eastleigh would obviously be a blow, winning it thanks to a candidate who bluntly disagrees with him on Europe, gay rights and who knows what other causes dear to Tory rebel hearts would hardly be an unqualified triumph. Whatever the result, this byelection won't settle anything about his leadership. | For David Cameron too, the sooner it's finished, arguably the better, since he's in even more of an awkward position than Nick Clegg. While failing to retake Eastleigh would obviously be a blow, winning it thanks to a candidate who bluntly disagrees with him on Europe, gay rights and who knows what other causes dear to Tory rebel hearts would hardly be an unqualified triumph. Whatever the result, this byelection won't settle anything about his leadership. |
| And in that sense it's reminiscent of another very different byelection, held at exactly this stage in the last parliament, two years away from a general election. All the same things now being said on the backbenches about Cameron – that he's a loser, that if next spring's local elections go badly as well the rebels will move against him, that names are being collected for some future coup – were being said then about Gordon Brown on the eve of the Crewe and Nantwich byelection. For what it's worth, Labour lost on a whopping great 18% swing to the Tories, yet despite an awful lot of muttering absolutely nothing happened. There was no real consensus on who might do better, just as there isn't now among Tory MPs. | And in that sense it's reminiscent of another very different byelection, held at exactly this stage in the last parliament, two years away from a general election. All the same things now being said on the backbenches about Cameron – that he's a loser, that if next spring's local elections go badly as well the rebels will move against him, that names are being collected for some future coup – were being said then about Gordon Brown on the eve of the Crewe and Nantwich byelection. For what it's worth, Labour lost on a whopping great 18% swing to the Tories, yet despite an awful lot of muttering absolutely nothing happened. There was no real consensus on who might do better, just as there isn't now among Tory MPs. |
| But in retrospect, we were all looking the wrong way in Crewe. The collapse of the Labour vote there was a warning sign not of Brown's unpopularity, but of how much deeper the party's problems ran, how far its electoral machine had fallen into disrepair. Covering Crewe as a reporter, what struck me was that the most coherent picture of what was happening on the ground came not from Labour but from a young Tory staffer called Alan Sendorek (unsurprisingly, he works for No 10 these days). | But in retrospect, we were all looking the wrong way in Crewe. The collapse of the Labour vote there was a warning sign not of Brown's unpopularity, but of how much deeper the party's problems ran, how far its electoral machine had fallen into disrepair. Covering Crewe as a reporter, what struck me was that the most coherent picture of what was happening on the ground came not from Labour but from a young Tory staffer called Alan Sendorek (unsurprisingly, he works for No 10 these days). |
| The Tories in Crewe had connected by talking about the rising cost of car tax, and petrol, and simple cost of living issues that worked on the doorsteps. All Labour had to offer was a wall of noise about Tory toffs and some asides about eastern European immigration: they sounded defensive, crude and deaf to their own people's concerns. What leaps out in retrospect is that Labour had no compelling offer to make to voters that could be summed up in a sentence, which is about the length of time most people will give a politician before tuning out – and five years later, for all the richness of its intellectual debate, arguably it still doesn't. | The Tories in Crewe had connected by talking about the rising cost of car tax, and petrol, and simple cost of living issues that worked on the doorsteps. All Labour had to offer was a wall of noise about Tory toffs and some asides about eastern European immigration: they sounded defensive, crude and deaf to their own people's concerns. What leaps out in retrospect is that Labour had no compelling offer to make to voters that could be summed up in a sentence, which is about the length of time most people will give a politician before tuning out – and five years later, for all the richness of its intellectual debate, arguably it still doesn't. |
| With less than three weeks to polling day in Eastleigh, that probably doesn't matter much. Nobody can lay out a terribly elegant policy stall in that time, although the Liberal Democrats are valiantly talking up the way they took poorer people out of tax. | With less than three weeks to polling day in Eastleigh, that probably doesn't matter much. Nobody can lay out a terribly elegant policy stall in that time, although the Liberal Democrats are valiantly talking up the way they took poorer people out of tax. |
| For the two frontrunners, it's all about arguing votes are wasted on anyone else; for Labour it's about offering a free potshot at a shambolic government – and if the writer and comedian John O'Farrell winds up as the candidate, about doing everything possible not to be squeezed out of the limelight. There will be endless heat, not much light, and probably few clues to the winner of the next election. But it might tell us something about how, and why, that election will be lost. /> | |