They didn’t get one. The curious can read what I think on the Surbiton Hill Forum website and the comments made by some others.

I am sad for the ward I served for so long and love so much that, where it formerly had councillors who knew their stuff and fought for their constituents – all of them! – to ensure that at least their concerns were given a fair hearing, it now has three glove-puppets for Derek Osbourne, one of whom has moved out of the Borough.

Being lampooned in this way for inconsistency is something the Lib Dems aren’t used to. According to my good friend Mary Reid (see blog link) there’s no such thing as the Lib Dem party as such. It’s a sort of confederation of autonomous local associations. So you could say that inconsistency is woven into the very fabric of the Lib Dems. In fact I have said so, many times!

Hitherto it has been very useful as the party could be all things to all men and never be called to account for its promises. Now it’s in government things are different. A coalition with Labour would have produced the same result for them. Pity really, because coalitions is what they say they’ve always wanted.

Ah well, Chris, be careful what you wish for in future.

It makes some telling points on the cost of AV. though, to be fair, I don’t see why counting machines would always be needed in single member constituencies like to ones we have now. I’m rather interested in whether such a scheme could be/would be used in local elections too. On multi-member wards like ours you could have easily 13 or more candidates for 3 seats. Counting  first past the post is complicated enough with cross voting every which way.

The leaflet also points out that major party votes are for candidates who come first will only count if they get 50% on the first round. If they don’t (and with lots of parties it’s increasingly unlikely that anyone will) the votes of extremist parties’ supporters get to be counted as many times as it takes to get someone over 50%. This could easily be three times, even where there are only five candidates for a single seat. The statement that the person ultimately elected has the support of more than half the voters is a mathematical statement, not a political one. How real is your support for your second choice, let alone your third or fourth? So talk about ‘fairer votes’ is eyewash – period!

I can see why the Lib Dems are aggrieved about the attacks on Nick Clegg. There he is on a page entitled ‘AV leads to broken promises’ holding his tuition fees pledge from last year. Very painful subject for Lib Dem candidates!! What they mean is it’s more likely to lead to Coalition governments, where no party can actually deliver on its manifesto to the voters, only on the deals it brokers after the election with its Coalition partners. Naive people think that ‘parties being forced to work together’ is a good thing. Those of us with experience of trying to put this into practice know better.

His Grace is speaking for himself from the 1980s-style intellectual comfort zone into which he has evidently retreated since last May. In the 1980s some Catholics, notably members of an organisation called Pax Christi took the ‘anti-Thatcherite’ view that high government spending was a morally laudable thing in itself. I was then, and I am now, on the side of the Good Samaritan, who, seeing the man wounded and robbed by the roadside, took action himself to alleviate his suffering out of his own pocket. No doubt the priests and Levites who walked by on the other side of the road complained compassionately to the authorities about the risks now involved in travelling from Jerusalem to Jericho and demanded that ‘they’ take action but did not help the man one whit themselves.

His Grace has achieved one thing. He has put me and Francis Maude on the same side for once!

However, I read that there is a plan afoot in Cameroon circles to give Clegg a boost following the victory of the ‘No’ vote on 5th May and expected Lib Dem losses in the local elections by letting him have PR for an elected House of Lords. If this is so, I hope they don’t think they’re speaking for Conservatives. There are seriously more important things in the minds of real Tories than House of Lords ‘reform’, and to waste so much time and effort on it as would necessarily be involved in order to appease the Lib Dem Left would be, in my opinion, grotesquely irresponsible.

Forget it Dave!

However, he is the Prime Minister in a Coalition government and he ought to be able to speak with authority on the Coalition’s behalf. Yet here we have Cable not just disagreeing with Cameron as a Liberal Democrat but usurping his position into the bargain by laying down what is Coalition policy and what isn’t.

Isn’t it time Cameron and/or Clegg called this maverick to order?

In the midst of all this we have a Referendum on whether to adopt the least popular method of electing MPs in the whole world – where they elect them at all, that is! ‘Barmy!’ I hear you cry – and you’re right!

HOWEVER, the worst thing people of sanity can do is to throw up their hands and say ‘I’m having nothing to do with it!’ and not vote. If you do that you leave it open to the celebrities and change-for-the-sake-of-it mongers to impose their half-baked scheme on the rest of us for good and all. Whoever you are and whatever your politics, please vote NO!

The system does not guarantee proportionality of seats. Far from it. It is not what the Lib Dems have campaigned for for decades, which makes their support for it such rank hypocrisy. They probably think that Labour voters will give the Lib Dems second preference against the Tories. But I have news for them. In large tracts of the South and West, where current or recent Lib Dem local authorities abound, lots of Labour activists and voters prefer the Tories to the Lib Dems. Quite a lot lent their votes to the Lib Dems in 2010 but they may well not do so again. Here in Kingston is a strong case in point.

Lib Dem supporters of AV hope it will lead to PR in the short term as its defects become apparent in practice. They are buying a pig in a poke if that’s what they think. What government is going to introduce a major constitutional change like this again within the next few decades? Australians have been critical of their system for decades (they are the only major country to use it, by the way) yet it is still there, largely because every government is nervous about kicking away the ladder by which it climbed to power.

So would everyone please think carefully about their vote on 5th May and find out as much as you can and ask yourself seriously whether this system is the one by which you want to elect MPs (and probably councillors too) for the rest of your life. If you want either to keep the present system – or to change to PR of some sort – then vote NO. It’s the only logocal thing to do.

1. Why did a man of his undoubted intelligence get himself into such a pickle in the first place?
2. Did he not realise that, to the press/public mind the details would look like one of the more lurid tales to emerge from the Expenses scandal?
3. Why did the Telegraph apparently sit on the information until now when much of it must have been known weeks if not months ago?

Laws says that he wanted to keep his sexuality a private matter. No-one surely would deny his right to do that. To avoid the possibility of the ‘scandal’ that has engulfed him, however, he would have been wiser not to live with his partner, pretending that the relationship between them was purely landlord-tenant. Alternatively he could have acknowledged that he was living with his partner and that he had, with him, a second home in London. He could have claimed ACA on the mortgage, depending on which he designated as his second home but he wouldn’t be able to tell the electors of Yeovil recently that his only home was in Yeovil; a point he made much of in the General Election campaign. It is probable that, if he had been open about it from the start, the electors of Yeovil would have voted for him just the same and he wouldn’t have been vulnerable to lurid revelations such as those on yesterdy’s Telegraph front page.

Of course, a few weeks ago he probably didn’t expect to be a Cabinet Minister quite so soon. Certainly for most of the years in question the possibility simply didn’t arise, unless he were to defect to either the Tories or Labour. And, by comparison with Labour and the Tories, the Lib Dems had come out of the Telegraph’s Expenses Scandal of last year looking rather snowy white. Lib Dem MPs and candidates made much of this at the GE – among them David Laws, who boasted of not having been required to pay back anything after the enquiry, unlike Tory Oliver Letwin in a nearby constituency, who had to pay back over £3000.  We shall see what the Commissioner for Standards concludes in this case.

One can only guess at the Telegraph’s motives in making these revelations now and not before the Election or last year. It’s possible they only just found out, though their relentless pursuit of so many over minor issues about duck houses and moats suggests  they may have had a lot of this material on file for some time. They certainly seem to know a great deal about the financial side of Mr. Laws relationship stretching back to 2001. Sadly I think the Telegraph has gone into something of a decline since the Barclay Brothers took it over.  I do not suggest they should have suppressed this story, but I do wonder at the timing of its release.

Needless to say it is the usual diatribe against the Conservative party, which had been out of power nationally since 1997 and hasn’t had ‘control’ of Kingston since 1994. Not that Ed ever admits to that, of course.

It contains direct untruths in his own hand.

• The Tories ‘tried to undermine my campaign to protect Health Services at Kingston Hospital.’ That ‘undermining’ consisted of getting undertakings from the person who is now Prime Minister and the one who is now Health Secretary that there would be no such closures. Davey did not get anything useful done. Helen Whately did.
• He goes on to invent a story about Conservative proposals to ‘cut local schools’ funding.’ I’ve been racking my brains to think where he can possibly have got this from. The only conclusion I can arrive at is  – he made it up! This is on a par with all the other Lib Dem scare stories that proliferated during the campaign. But Davey has to take personal responsibility for these. They are in his own fair hand.

He goes on to say ‘I hope people know me well enough now……….’ Sadly, they evidently don’t – but some of us DO.