Initial take on Bromley and Chiselhurst

So what to make of the Bromley bye election result ? Here's my first take - haven't checked on what others are saying yet.

Well first congratulations to Bob Neil on winning and also to attacking the negative muck raking Lib Dem tactics.

Next - the Lib Dems did well getting their vote to turn out. Perhaps they picked up some from Labour - but Labour were down by 8316 votes, even scaling for the lower turn out it suggests that the Lib Dems picked up far less than half of their votes. The success of the negative campaign seems to be in reducing the Conservative turn out.

Also the Lib Dems have thrown everything at a seat, my guess is that usually picks up low resource in general elections.

UKIP probably removed quite a few Conservative votes and nearly managed to allow the seat to be won by the most pro-Euro federalist party in Britain - surely even they must have pause for thought on that count ( no pun intended ... )

The political parties will have their canvassing results which will give them a much better picture, but I'm guessing that the Conservative party isn't as worried as you might think - based on the interview with Francis Maude this morning - where he used it as an opportunity to push party reform. ( If he was worried he would have taken a different tack in public ), and the Lib Dem party spokesperson (who ?) who blamed it all on David Cameron ( he must really scare them) which given the choice of candidate is perhaps not the first person who would get any blame in circulation.

But is so often said - lessons must be learnt. And I hope its this one - the Lib Dems need to be squared up to, not because of their policies ( they change so often and vary so much ), but because of the negative and corrosive impact of their form of politics. There much racking must be rebutted fast ( a lesson New Labour learnt before 1997) and we must make the scales fall from the publics eyes so they see the Yellow Party as those activists in the Conservative and Labour parties do.

Update:

Reading comments at ConservativeHome and TaxCutter's comments look spot on to me. We know what the Lib Dems do each time - why isn't our answer better and faster. I'd emphaise again how good at this New Labour got in 1997.

Looks like Dave Cameron is going to say in public what needs to be said about the Lib Dems - well done !