The gossip around Westminster is that if the Cleggmeister wins the LibDem leadership Chris Rennard, the LibDem Chief Executive and campaigns guru, will be looking for alternative employment. Have they gone stark staring mad?For the uninitiated Chris Rennard is possibly the most brilliant electoral strategist in this country at the moment. The Conservatives and Labour would kill to have someone like him in their midst. He's overseen by election victory after by election victory, but in the last eighteen months his star has been on the wane in certain parts of the LibDems. They reckon he's not quite what he was. He's blamed for the poor performance at the 2007 local elections and some reckon the LibDems should have done far better in the Ealing by election. Quaequam writes it all up HERE. I interviewed Chris on 18DS in April HERE.
Getting rid of Rennard would be a high risk strategy for the new leader of the LibDems. There's no obvious replacement, but it would certainly send a signal that it's 'all change'. I am certain they would live to regret it.
28 comments:
You are of course right, but are you sure this isn't black propaganda by the other side?
I`m confused , as a brillaint electoral strategist ( whatever that is ) should he not have won some elections?
I notice that fat blood sucker Norman Baker has changed his tuned and clung to Nick Clegg . He has been on the make since he was born the old fraud
If Clegg wins, no amount of electoral strategy will help the Lib Dems.
They chose for 'telegenics' rather than politics. End of story.
If Clegg wins, and I were Rennard, I'd be looking at some more positive opportunity . . . maybe Llama farming, or a Baskin Robbins franchise in Tatarstan.
There is money in Llama farming , better than sheep
Tankus
well as they seem to be imploding as a party, one more good man thrown out wouldnt really make a difference.
In Wales they are just a joke - did you see the latest ruse from Peter Black?
A few bLoggers have noted it including me.Check out Glyn Davies Blog or Ordo's
If Chris Rennard is reading this, could he give my office a call to arrange an appointment?
The Lib/Dems are right now effectively a dead man still just about breathing, and the pulse is also very weak.
It should be clear to them that the strategy must change direction a full 180% ASAP.
Instead of trying their best to undermine the Conservative party in order to become the alternative government.
They must now surely start to seriously undermine the New Labour party. For precisely the reasons they have been doing the opposite between the years 79-07.
They must strike the sort of unexpected killer blow to New Labour it can never hope to recover from.
By joining the Conservative opposition in a full on attack on New Labour especially during the next election campaign.
This next few years is the only chance they are ever going to get for a generation or two to wipe out Labour as an effective political force forever.
I dont believe they will try to do any thing of the sort, because the role of the Lib/Dem party is never to get into real power. It is just to make sure the other two parties dont forget THE AGENDA.
But it is what the Lib/Dems should do if they had the countries interests at heart, all the same. Either that or disband and tell their members to vote for either of the two main parties. That is if they have changed a habit of a lifetime and want to take responsibility for what happens in their country for once in their lives.
Otherwise vote UKIP, Monster Raving Loony, Respect, Green or don't bother voting at all. Because right now the Lib/Dems are a waste of time money and space for ordinary people as far as national politics is concerned.
Rennard is over-rated. Look, when the Tories were on the slide the Lib Dems have had a field day.
The question they now face is what to do when the Tories are on the rise, the Greens are less, ahem, 'eclectic' and they have an ageing volunteer workforce, fewer Councillors and face a battle to defend?
Rennard is yesterdays man. His targetting mantra and the tensions over funding within the Lib Dem go hand in hand. Ultimately he's not indispensable and if he thinks he's some sort of demi-god it'll rebound.
Rennard is brilliant, but very inflexible and formulaic. I can imagine his style wouldn't sit very comfortably with the direction Clegg would be likely to take the party in. One bad performance in a by-election and he'd be accused of having gone mad for getting rid him of - but then, it's not all about by-elections.
I think once vince cable has gone the limpdums can sink back into insignificance whence they came."Go home and prepare for bed!!" to paraphrase some nonentity or other.
well I am biased but the Liberal Democrats don't seem to be projecting a distinctive 'brand', what they are good at is winning by-election contests or at least doing well in them,so losing their key strategist would seem unwise.
The leadership contest does not seem to be setting the world on fire..
Are you suggesting that he is head hunted by the Tories ?
Rennard is a brilliant by-election strategist and nobody in the Lib Dems (or any party) could possibly deny it.
The difficulty is whether he is a brilliant - or even an adequate - general election strategist. His tendancy is to try to fight 60 or 70 by-elections on one day which is unrealistic. You have to win seats where you cannot possibly deliver three leaflets a week for a month and a half.
The Brits have got a lot further to go on targeting in the way the Americans have used it. The neo-cons have built a whole movemnet out of it by building proper databases. On the liberal side you should also check out Mark Penn's book.
If the 'Focus' approach of dog mess and traffic can be adapted that's great but you get a feeling that where campaigning is concerned you need new blood every ten years.
I watched the Doughty St interview, which was good, but also very revealing. Rennard was wrong in all predictions he made during the programme - most glaringly, where he predicts LibDem gains in the (then) upcoming Scottish Parliament elections at the beginning of this year. He was slippery and evasive to my mind when discussing the remarkable way the LibDems allowed a drunk to remain in charge and refused to repay criminally gained mega-donations.
I also thought it stuck out how much the Tories would now like to see the LibDems as allies against New Labour. This actually was the historical role of the Liberals - they were a third choice Tories could go to when there was no hope of a Tory candidate coming through, but in the last two decades they went the other way, stealing Tory votes across the South-West as Thatcherism was too strong for many centrist conservative voters.
Visibly there is a campaign to re-align the LDP into it's traditional role as the "other" Tories - hence the press campaigns for Nick Clegg. The gap between Clegg and Cameron is wafer-thin.
Chris Rennard
come on over to Cameron's Liberal Conservatives, mate!
Well, he can't be that 'brilliant', can he? Confusing...
Also, looks do matter. :)
Change is good.
If they did badly in those polls, maybe he has lost a bit.
The reason the Libdems did badly in the local council elections has more to do with their financial incompetence than anything Rennard did or didn't do. Any voter who has the misfortune to live in an area where the Libdems have control of their council come to regret the thoughtless casting of their vote sooner or later.
Lord Rennard brilliant? Well, yeah, if you like congratulating pickpockets on a crime well done.
His practices bring politics into disrepute. His targetted strategy is based on concentration of activists from across the country into a small area who then micro-manage messages to the voters.
Nothing wrong with that in itself but the messages are often contradictory in order to win the the vote - ie hypocritical. They also indulge in contriving fears - this and that hospital/school is under threat, when they aren't; smearing opponents with insinuation and innuendo; selective quoting and made up bar charts with no basis in reality. In short - lies.
This leaves opponents with the quandry of giving them more profile by responding or having to deny being pig-f****rs.
So hardly the stuff of political debate or moving the country on. More the nuisance of a bunch of political anoraks who like psephology and the thrill of election victories but don't stand for anything.
They and Rennard pollute the body politic and sometimes get away with it by always accusing the other parties of being negative...by being negative about the other parties.
The truth is the LDs went backwards in the May local elections and in Scotland and Wales.
Rennard then promulgated the spin that net losses were a "mixed bag of results".
We then had the Ealing Southall by election where the LDs failed for the first time in 20 years to win a Govt seat where the LDs started in 2nd place.
Apart from that what did he do this year?
Will I lie Rennie has it bang on - Rennard is simply the engineer of hypocritical LibDem "all things to all voters" manouverism. Sadly it's got them 60-odd MPs so the dismal thing is that it shows it works. "Focus" was always a sham too - the real aim of LibDemerie was always to feather-bed a few Mluds and Mladies in the Heuses to indulge their political hobbyism, whilst a bunch of pathetically deluded footsoldiers handed out newsletters and fixed drains. It's all a huge distraction and it's high time the media stopped adding to the featherbedding by reporting their ludicrous "election" non-event as well.
Anon at 5:09pm "Sadly it's got them 60-odd MPs so the dismal thing is that it shows it works."
Sadly yes but then that might be a question that could be put to the mainstream media who pick up on the minutae of contradictions in the mainstream parties but largely ignore the LibDems because they think their not worth it or, worse, think it's a jolly good wheeze.
Perhaps when they start to point up the sharp practices the LibDems have become reknowned for then we could flush out this pollution from the system.
Some do but it's never sustained to get into the public eye and become a permanent phrase in public discourse. Mainstream political party activists may know them but they haven't fed through to the general public - some of whome remain sadly ignorant how this party has abused their vote to get a LibDem MP elected who then votes against what they thought they were voting them in for.
Nick Cohen was quite good on how their focus on "local" candidates and issues had polluted Westminster when it should be discussing the big issues of state rather than those more appropriate to council chambers.
All the likes of the LibDems and Rennard have done is block parliamentary time with dog s**t issues for the sake of a corpse-party whose time had passed in the 1920's and who's raison d'etre had passed in to all the other parties since all are broadly (small l) liberal (small d) democrat.
It all comes back to - what is the point of the LibDems?
The reason the Fib Dems didn't win Ealing or Bromley is that the campaigns were run by the same person that failed to win Folkestone, Eastbourne or any other seat in his charge - Sean Roberts. Proving it ain't wot you know its who you know.
Rennard will survive, until he chooses to retire. He needs to recognise the call for a narrative beyond incremental growth and that there must be more support for non-target seats.
Rennard's "brilliance" for launching concentrated lying, sorry targetted, campaigns is overblown.
The LibDems were winning spectacular by-elections well before he came along - Orpington and Roxburgh for example.
He may have learnt from those successes but the overall conclusion is that the LibDems have become a party of by-election hobbyists but hopeless national election professionals.
Winning by-elections only works if it creates a national momentum and you argue a convincing narrative.
Trouble is that they have not been able to convince influential commentators of that since all they do is win by-elections and lose national elections.
That's become their narrative and they miss the boat on getting the momentum to win big nationally. They've become addicted to by-election concentrated style campaigning and ignored national messaging to get the momentum going.
Their best chance was 2005. They could have become the main opposition or, if the mo had gone big style, won.
Instead they carried on with fighting marginals as by-elections and targetted prominent Tories - instead of a weak Labour party where they were getting votes from. They also failed to promote themselves as an alternative government.
They blew it and it will be generations, if ever, if such a chance comes up again.
It was the same in Scotland. They won Dunfermline spectacularly after coming 2nd in the 2005 elections in Scotland.
They were in prime position to consolidate their position as second party in Scotland and eclipse the SNP for good.
Trouble was they were in coalition with Labour in the Scottish Parliament and failed to take the opportunity of going into opposition to cement the image of the alternative to Labour.
The fools remained in coalition up until the election and spent more time attacking the SNP than Labour.
The result speaks for itself. They were even eclipsed by the Tories and came fourth.
In short. Outside of concentrated campaigning they are just not very good nationally.
The upshot is that they will wither on the margins in Scotland when it comes to national elections as their unique selling point of being the party of coalition government has been thrown away in a fit of post-election pique and any future Labour Scottish Government is just going to go into minority since it works for the SNP.
Thus making the question of what is the point of voting LibDem in Scotland even more persuasive.
Mark Hanson
What the hell is The Neo-Con Party?
There is no such thing. Thats why the bastards are so insanely lethal.
The Neo-Cons as you put it, are running both of the main American Parties. To my knowledge they have been since 1913, and very likely far longer then that.
However many complete and utter lies anyone else tells you.
You haven't been watching to much BBC again have you?
My advice is only watch the BBC for the Queens Speech of the weather report. Otherwise you will never understand anything.
Typical - they blame the salesman and not the product.
Poor iain. Doesn't understand tat the lib dem parliamentary leader has no say over the fate of the Chief Exec of the party. Not a dictatorship like the tories y'see.
Of course Rennard himself is not a patch on what he was - the present job goes well beyond his expertise (campaigning) and the woman who he's got doing his old job is not a patch on him or particularly his previous deputy who was responsible for the Solihull gain and is sorely missed.
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