One could almost feel sorry for Brian Paddick, who has published his London Mayoral campaign diary in (believe it or not) the Mail on Sunday. He was a candidate with little media experience, running for a party which has only ever had to drop a few leaflets, with some dodgy bar charts and attacking the incumbent, to get votes.
Now, though, the LibDems are becoming increasingly irrelevant, with their single trump card of Iraq now spent and their only hope left being to fiddle the electoral system and scrape a cabinet post in a coalition.
Yet where else can Paddick go? Brian, of course, has come out of the closet … as a socialist dinosaur, voting for the Left List. So now, complaining about being squeezed between the two main parties, lack of media attention, his true sympathies being with the far left … Paddick is a rare thing: a Lib Dem through and through. Next he’ll be calling for proprtional representation … oh yes, that’s right, they had it in London, and look what good it did them!
Hat tip: Iain Dale
12th May, 2008 at 10:37 am |
Oh no they didn’t… that was not proportional representation. We do of course have PR for elections in the UK in Northern Ireland, we used to have it for some parliamentary seats too.
12th May, 2008 at 11:05 am |
Granted, there are many different PR systems, and I know STV (used for the Mayoral race) is not generally regarded as one of them, but the d’Hondt/list system used for the London-wide seats is PR, and the LD vote was still hammered.
17th May, 2008 at 9:59 am |
Agreed the d’Hondt system is PR – the worst form, FPTP is frankly better than the party list. Still can complain too much we run Devon with ten more seats than the Tories for almost the same number of votes -FPTP in action!
17th May, 2008 at 11:14 am |
[...] generated a negative premium – a “Brian discount” if you will. Well, as he has effectively said, the Lib Dems are rubbish at campaigning in London now. (Bad workmen and all that, [...]