2017 General Election Diary day 6: Record breaking

Two bits of ‘things not seen in many years’ news coming out today. First up, Liberal Democrat membership has passed 100,000 for the first time since 1994. The milestone was passed at some point today, and the 100,000th member has yet to be revealed, but it’s another example of the way the party’s membership hasn’t just bounced back after the coalition but rocketed on to levels no one was really expecting to see again. The record membership for the party was just a little over 100,000, so expect to see that record broken at some point in the next day or two as well.

It will be interesting to see how this new membership affects the party, given that now over half of the party has joined (or rejoined) since the 2015 General Election. Will these new members be active campaigning in their local parties? Will they all want to come along to the party conference and use their right to vote? Of course, this is only a modern record for the party, as the old Liberals had membership in the hundreds of thousands up until the 1960s, but as I explained in an earlier post on why people join political parties, a lot of that membership was strictly local and more based on wanting to use the facilities of the local Liberal Club than any political tendency.

(For fans of international comparisons, I believe this makes the Lib Dems the largest party within the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe, but still behind the Canadian Liberals in the contest to be the largest in Liberal International)

Our second bit of record-breaking comes in Welsh polling news. (Yes, I know I ranted about obsessing over polls yesterday, but I’ve got space to fill and tenuous links to make) Just as Labour look set to head back to early 1906 in having no MPs at all in Scotland, so the Tories are looking to head back to the 1920s in Wales. Which is when they were the largest party. It’s starting to feel like as well as John Curtice for the psephology, the BBC’s election night coverage is going to need a team of historians to keep up with all the ‘first time since’ news that breaks during the night.

With most political commentary looking over the Channel and processing the French Presidential first round results (if you missed it, my take is here), there’s been a slightly muted quality to election campaigning today, which might explain why no one’s seen Theresa May out taking the arguments to the people at all in the last twenty four hours. However, this morning did give us the now traditional first election sighting of Michael Fallon saying that Labour will be bad for Britain’s security. The real challenge for interviewers now is seeing just how long they can keep him talking for before he lapses into that soundbite, though anything longer than a few seconds seems frankly impossible.

In ‘maybe this is the moment that finally collapses this reality back into the real timeline’ news, Ed Miliband has started following the Miliverse Twitter account, which tells us what would have happened in a world where he’d won the 2015 election. Spoiler alert: there’s a lot less Brexit and a lot more arguments over biscuits.

And finally, it’s time for the return of the regular feature that at least one person mentioned on Twitter in the last week so I can claim it’s by popular demand: Election Leaflet Of The Day! And when it comes to the General Election, that title is even more descriptive than usual because we have just one General Election leaflet on the Election Leaflets site — and it’s from Gerald Vernon-Jackson, Portsmouth South candidate for the Liberal Democrats. Unfortunately, Gerald made the classic error of being in such a rush to get the leaflet designed, printed and delivered that he forgot to include anything in it that makes for easy mockery from a blogger like me looking for cheap laughs. However, as the candidate of the first Election Leaflet Of The Day, he is now assured a place in a very, very, tiny footnote in the most meticulously detailed history of this election, should someone choose to write that.

And even though this isn’t a local elections blog, I do feel someone has to draw attention to this leaflet’s ‘we’ve paid for the stock footage of a magician, so yes, we’re using it, I don’t care how little it connects to the text’ aesthetic. I expect to see those principles applied to General Election publicity in the next few days, or I’ll start believing people aren’t really trying.

Originally published at www.nickbarlow.com on April 24, 2017.