Ming ordered to shape up
Menzies Campbell must “shape up” and start proving he can give the Liberal Democrats a chance in the next election, one of the party’s AMs has warned.
Peter Black, Welsh assembly member for South Wales West, said the 65-year-old “has made little impact with the public” in his five months as leader and must raise his game.
His comments came in response to yesterday’s ICM poll for The Guardian which showed the Lib Dems have fallen to 17 per cent of support, four points down on last month and six points down on this time last year.
However, Lib Dem Oxford councillor Stephen Tall hit back, warning that in this “hyper-kinetic, hyper-connected digital world we live in” the “slavering” of “geek-obsessives” over opinion polls must not be taken too seriously.
Concerns about Sir Menzies’ abilities as leader began almost as soon as he was elected to succeed Charles Kennedy in March, with most of the criticism focusing around his performance in prime minister’s question time in the Commons.
Many of his MPs have come forward to support him, but the row going on in the rest of the party comes to the surface from time to time, most revealingly in individual Lib Dems’ weblogs.
Writing in his blog last night, Mr Black warned that the failure to boost the party’s opinion polls so far meant that the next few months, which include the publication of the Lib Dems’s tax proposals and the autumn conference, “are going to be critical”.
“In a week or two we will be publishing tax plans that have largely been drawn up by the Treasury team. Worthy as they are, these proposals seem unfocused and lack a clear narrative. It is my hope that once we see the full details that will change,” he wrote.
“However, it did not help that Ming felt it necessary to reveal details before the commission had reported or the democratically-elected policy committee had decided whether to accept them or not.”
He complained that Mr Kennedy was forced out by MPs “against the wishes of the membership”, and that they currently seemed to be “the only people who appear to be totally content with the leader”.
“They have to realise that, important as they are, they are not the party. Having experienced a coup de grace at the top, we are entitled to expect results,” Mr Black warned.
However, writing in his blog, Cllr Tall warned: “It’s often forgotten today how sceptical many people were that Labour would really win in 1997. The spectre of John Major’s surprise 1992 triumph, when he confounded the pollsters, still hung heavy.”
He added: “All this displacement activity is, of course, merely distracting from the fact that no-one has a bloody clue when the next general election might be, or what will happen when it’s called – least of all Gordon Brown, David Cameron or Ming Campbell.
“It also absolves the media of their responsibility to have to focus on the boring crap – like, y’know, public policy – when they could be talking s**t about who’s hot and who’s not.”
Peter Black AM’s blog can be found at peterblack.blogspot.com, and Stephen Tall’s blog can be found at oxfordliberal.blogspot.com
