Well it’s been over a year now and the election is starting to peek over the horizon
So Nick should be getting his act together, but whenever he is front of the media …..I’m just not convinced.
It’s not that he is rubbish far from it……. it’s just that I believe, he isn’t good enough to be take on this demanding role.
He looks uncomfortable in front of the camera, he sounds hesitant on the radio and lacks the cutting edge at question time.
It seems to me sitting from afar, that his close advisers and speech writers are struggling to present him in the right way. The result is a frankly lacklustre polling results and no real momentum to take us further forward.
But I know we do have the right argument s, MP’s freely admit that Vince is right on the button whenever he speaks, and there has been quite a few occasions when the Lib Dem policies is recycled into either the government or Tories latest "new idea".
So my question tonight is how long before we call Vince back in and ask him to take up the leadership role again, only this time shouldn't we give him a real chance to run our party?
Thursday, 29 January 2009
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4 comments:
Oh for goodness sake. Are we going to change leaders every six months? Clegg was democratically elected by the whole party and we should give him a break.
I've been around the party long enough to remember the murmurings against both Ashdown and Kennedy when they'd been in the job for little over a year. Ashdown, let us not forget, led the party to 6% of the vote in the 1989 Euro elections. That didn't stop both Ashdown and Kennedy from leading the party to their best ever results for decades.
No is the simple answer!
No Liberal leader has ever built a high profile until they have been through a General Election. Newsnight carried out some focus groups on the party leaders at the time of the Autumm Conferences and it was Nick who came out on top proving that when we get the exposure Nick will be a great asset.
We are extremely fortunate to have Vince leading on the economy and the next General Election will be based on the state of the economy. So we will have two big hitters.
It is up to all of us now to do the work at the local level to support Nick and the team.
Look guys you are right to say in that in the past our leaders haven't done well until the general election. But hey this isn't like the past, haven't you noticed????
This election will be fought on the economy, immigration, and tax, but more importantly it will be fought on personality. After all that’s all the Tories have really got. How many votes did we lose in the last election when it became clear Kennedy wasn’t on top of his game? Do we need to go through that again?
Ask yourself, who can you see as the next prime minster Nick or Vince ? …. Oh and if your answer is ”well it doesn’t matter we are not going to win anyway and 65 to 80 MP’s will be a good result” hang your head in shame. Our country needs us now, are you ready for it?
Nick seems to me to be a good guy, when I have met him he seems nice enough, but not the next prime minster, and that is the problem. We have to give the nation the best choice at the next election, right now that’s Vince Cable…… and we have to do make that change soon.
The problem is that during the LibDem leadership election the great and the good, almost all media commentators, and many of the more naive party activists were telling us we MUST vote Clegg, because he was just so obviously such a good performer and his natural ability would mean the support would come piling in as soon as he was in place.
It didn't happen, did it? Look, when the leadership election was first announced and Clegg was already being pushed on us as "our next leader", I was posting article after article saying that I couldn't see what it was about Clegg that people found so exciting, and that I felt he would turn out - well, as you Phil describe him.
All it seems to me happened was that Clegg was pushing out messages to people in the media that he wanted to push the party to the economic right, and they were all mad keen on this more markets, let the City boys run everything, sort of politics (this was 2007), that they backed him and told us we must too. Plus he was a public schoolboy, and all those public schoolboys in the media commentariat automatically suppose "one of us" is naturally the best person.
We can't get rid of Clegg now, for sure. But next time, PLEASE, can we not listen to those in the media telling us how to run our party?
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