Liberal England reports his Lordship is restored to good health and writing his diary again.

As usual, some rather good snippets.

Quite the saddest event of the year so far has been the ending of the engagement between the delightful Sian Lloyd and our own Lembit Öpik. The Member for Montgomery, you will have read, has instead taken up with one of the Cheeky Girls, though I am not convinced that even he could say which one with any confidence. One must be wary of continually harking back to the ‘Good Old Days’, but I have to say that I cannot recall having trouble of this sort with Clement Davies and the Beverley Sisters.

Although you’d have thought that someone with such an attention to detail as to include the umlaut on Öpik would remember the circumflex in Siân.

When you go canvassing with the Lib Dems, normally, you’re armed with canvass cards that carry quite detailed information.  For any given household, you will know the full names of the people on the electoral register, their dates of birth if they have recently turned 18 or are about to.  You will know whether or not they have voted in the past (or at least whether or not they were issued with a ballot paper) – this information is available to political parties who get their act together and collect the info in time.  You will also know whether they’ve been canvassed before and how the person doing the canvassing interpreted what was said.  (We never know how people vote – we just talk to them, and we get an impression.)

Armfuls of data.  But not the really useful stuff.

You don’t know how they are known, you know their full name.  If you knock on a door, and ask for Patricia when the woman there is known as Pat, you immediately put hackles up.  I’d not be impressed at people addressing me as Alexander, even though that is what will be on the electoral register.

For women, you don’t know what title they use, and you can tread on all sorts of toes by getting Miss, Ms and Mrs wrong.

So there’s a few things to worry about before you even ring the bell.

Once you have pushed the button and not heard a bell, you face your next dilemma.  Does the doorbell work, but just ring out of earshot? Or is it one of the thousands of bells which don’t work, and you should knock as well.  If you do knock, and the doorbell did work, even though you didn’t hear it, you risk annoying the householder who will come to the door huffing and puffing and saying, “Yes, I heard you the first time,” which doesn’t put them in a good frame of mood to be pestered by a politico.

But if there’s no doorbell, you have to knock anyway.  And you have to knock at the right level.  Knock too quietly and no-one will come.  Knock too loudly and you risk giving the impression you’re a bailiff, and no-one will come.  In some of the less well-maintained parts of town, if you’re too rough with a door, or gate, etc, then you will break it if you’re not sufficiently gentle knocking or opening.

But assuming you’ve got through the hurdles of the name and the doorbell (and with all these thoughts going through your head whilst waiting for someone to come to the door you often forget the name of the person whose door you are knocking on, and look a pillock when you have to consult your canvass card again while you desperately try and scan down the page and remember which house number you’re at) you then have to start a conversation with a stranger who doesn’t want to talk to you.

Which is always fun.

Cut and paste is an excellent way of making sure one simple mistake ends up on 10,000 leaflets, which end up having to be recycled and reprinted.

It’s going to be a long night.

Last year, for the bank holiday weekend, we went camping in Sandringham.  This year, I’m spending it on the office, slaving over a hot Riso.

I think I know which I prefer.

Canvassing is a numbers game.  Whilst standing at unanswered doors yesterday evening, I was multiplying fractions.

About one in ten people are in, or answer the door when knocked.

Only half of the people of that inner city ward register to vote.

Only one in five actually votes in local elections.

Of those that vote in that area, half voted Lib Dem at the last election.

That’s 1/10 * 1/2 * 1/5 * 1/2  = 1/200 chance that any given door I knock on will have someone behind it who will tell me they will vote Lib Dem.

I have to knock on 200 doors to find someone who will vote for us.  And if I do, that means we are winning.

So why do we it? Because one in ten of those one in two hundred people might join the Lib Dems if asked.  And one in ten of those might help out and deliver leaflets.  And who knows, one in ten of those might want to become a Lib Dem councillor.

That gets us to 1/200,000.

There are only 280,000 people in Nottingham.  We’re clearly screwed.  Or I can’t do maths.

My local Tories spent the last Full Council meeting rattling their sabres.  They made it very clear that Labour’s current budget would just be an “interim” budget, because after May, the place would be full of “young, professional Conservative Councillors” with new brooms ready to sweep the place clean.

This is quite a tall order.  I think they have to quadruple their current numbers to take outright control.  They’re currently languishing behind us, and they did much worse than us at the last Council elections.

And there’s no sign they are campaigning for it on the ground.  I live in a Lab/Con marginal ward.  It elected 2 Lab, 1 Con last time, but the Tories (and we!) were hammered into the ground in the by-election caused by the surprised Conservative victor resigning the seat we don’t think she expected to win, a few months into the last Council.

In the last six months, I’ve received a number of Labour leaflets.  Some of them are even quite good, as Labour leaflets go.

Nada from the Tories.

Once, a year ago, there were Tory leafletters in my local high street handing leaflets out – but that’s a slightly scattergun approach to getting your message out.

Similarly, they were spotted with a street stall at a market in the North of the city, so one of our spies helped themselves to a full selection of literature.  Not much evidence of these “young, professionals.”  Lots of evidence of the usual suspects.

The Tory Shadow Minister for Nottingham, Angela Lansbury helpfully told the Nottingham Evening Post recently that there was no way the Conservatives could take the city, a statement that was hastily rebutted by the local lot who retorted in a letter that that was precisely what they were intending to do.

But how?  It seems that they think that because the opinion polls are doing reasonably well for the Tories nationally, they will simply mop up seats in the city without having to do anything like knock on doors or deliver leaflets.

Or maybe they will suddenly come from no-where and have a huge leafletting campaign in April – but that is really leaving things a little late.

If they do manage to win the council on the back of one month’s leafletting, my aching legs and feet will curse them!

I did have a good conference and didn’t get fed up with people. Stayed in a lovely guest house called Acorn Lodge that had been block-booked by friends from the south.  The proprietors were incredibly helpful and friendly even though I managed to turn up in the middle of the night, and, I’ve just found out, leave with my room key.

I wonder how many Lib Dems are posting keys back to Harrogate tonight.

It was great to catch up with my friends too.  After six years in politics, it seems some of my friends are about to become PPCs.  Well, at least one of them is in a key seat.