Thank you, Cheltenham

It’s always interesting to talk to Liberal Democrat colleagues from Cheltenham who have chalked up a very impressive electoral record.

Continuing to run the council all the way through multiple elections in the years of Coalition is a rare record, and in the 2013 county elections they scored the even rarer result of an increase in Lib Dem vote share across the district on 2009. (The only increase in the country, in fact, if you exclude the one other case where the vote share went up by dint of standing candidates.) It’s not a perfect record, as the sad loss of Martin Horwood’s seat in 2015 attests, but it is a record only very few others in the party can look on at with anything other than envy.

So it was a pleasure to go and run a digital campaigning training session followed by being guest speaker at their evening social yesterday:

My subject in the evening was, of course, the core votes strategy set out by David Howarth and myself (and recently featured in The Economist).

My diary is filling up with other Liberal Democrat speaking gigs through the autumn, but always open to adding in more dates – if you’re in reasonable travel time of London, do get in touch.