By-elections always tend to have many more losers than the one winner and last Thursday’s Eastleigh by-election was no exception. There was even a potentially important lesson for the NHS action party which had its first by-election outing, and that’s the main topic I want to write about today.
But first I want to talk a little about one of the biggest losers at Eastleigh – an organisation that was not even standing. The Daily Mail spent the 10 days leading up to the by-election trying its best to get the Eastleigh electorate not to vote for the Liberal Democrats. They ran a media campaign against Lord Rennard in a very clever way – assisted by the failure of the Liberal Democrat leadership to grasp the issue.
