A few months ago, I spent some time campaigning in a rural seat which, despite high hopes, we had failed to take at the previous election. At one point, a number of members took me aside and confided to me their views on why this was. “We delivered too many leaflets”, they complained. “We shouldn’t have produced tabloid newspapers” they explained “they’re too downmarket.” In the space of a few minutes, they attacked just about every successful local campaigning technique that the party has developed over the last thirty years.

I told them I didn’t agree – that however much we might all prefer to sit at home instead of going out delivering in the rain, it was exactly doing this that had turned the tide in the decline of twentieth century liberalism, and seen us start to win seats again rather than lose them. Impatiently dismissing their innovative – and in one or two cases, extremely odd – suggestions for what we ought to do instead to win votes, I found myself saying “There is a formula, and it works”.

And work it really does. The proof is in the thousands of council seats and dozens of parliamentary seats which the party has won in recent years, and which came about because of the sheer hard work which local campaigners have put in – often over many decades. We are bloody good at local campaigning, and it works.

The sheer power of local campaigning to move mountains is made most clear in byelections. Somebody told me that in the Brent East campaign, the Liberal Democrats delivered a million leaflets – somewhere around 120 for each vote that we won.

It’s this kind of result which means that the success of local campaigning is so universally recognised within the party – and which is so widely feared by our opponents, both locally and in parliamentary byelections.

But for those of us who believe in the sheer power of this kind local campaigning, the result on May 5th does throw up some conundrums.

For this time, the list of seats which we actually won, had surprisingly little correlation to the seats where we had worked – which had followed the strict campaigning rules for how to win a target seat. Indeed in a number of target seats where the local campaign had done everything by the book, and the candidate and campaign team had worked furiously hard day and night for months, in terms of votes we actually went backwards.

Conversely, in some inner city seats, where we ran no campaign to speak of at all, and the candidate was selected barely a matter of days before the campaign started, we enjoyed significant swings to us – sometimes of up to 12%.

How do we reconcile these outcomes in the cold light of a general election result, with the unarguable success of the local campaigning technique?

The explanation surely starts from the fact that in a national election, most voters receive the vast majority of their information about what the election is about through the national (or at best regional) broadcast media and newspapers, which obviously focus on the national leaders and the parties’ national political positioning. (And until we as a party are able to produce several TV and radio channels and daily newspapers ourselves, this will remain the case!). Unsurprisingly, therefore, most people decide how they are going to vote on the basis of what they have seen of the parties’ overall national approach.

And – leaving aside the comparative advantage which our local campaigning brings us, which we are obviously right to pursue – it is surely right that voters should be making their choice on the basis of a party’s political position, rather than on the basis of the fact that they have had more pieces of paper through their letterbox with our candidate’s name on it than with their opponent’s. Voting in a General Election is after all supposed to be a political choice about which party and approach we want to govern the country for the next few years, not judging a contest in campaigning techniques.

So is intensive local campaigning, with lots of leaflets, surveys and press releases from a hardworking candidate and campaign team, a waste of time? Clearly, the evidence shows that it isn’t.

But the lesson we should learn from this year’s election is that while effective local campaigning can make the very most of our potential in particular constituencies, the deciding factor for the great majority of voters is how they perceive a party’s overall political position and approach.

Strong local campaigns are superb at tipping strong second places just over the edge into Lib Dem gains – winning us another 20 or 30 seats, or even 40 or 50 – but what will cause a mass turning of support to us – gaining us 100, 200 or 300 seats – is our overall political appeal.

This pitch, and our political positioning, is more than just an agglomeration of all our policies. At this general election we had greater success than in the past in successfully communicating a wider range of our headline policies to the public. But what voters told pollsters they found more difficult to perceive, was the underlying theme and overall political approach which underpinned our policies, which defined our approach.

Our key challenge for the next four years – and which more than anything else will determine how many seats we win at the next General Election – is defining, and relentlessly communicating to the public, what it is that makes us different from the other parties – what our underlying approach is.

It is about the biggest picture. In 1979 Thatcher’s appeal was that she would shake up the country’s economy and industrial relations. In 1997 Blair’s was to promise to take the government back for the people from the sleaze-ridden and out of touch Tories. What will our appeal be in 2009? Will we promise to cut tax or raise it? Will we want to increase the role of the state in citizens’ personal lives, or reduce it?

I have my own views on what our answers – and indeed the questions – should be. But that’s not really the point. These are the kinds of questions that we need to be answering.

And as we do it, we need to do it clearly and boldly.

Too often one of the consequences of Liberal Democrats being less obnoxious than many of our political opponents, is that we want to keep everyone happy. This is a lovely idea – but in practice it means that too many of our positions and policies appeal only to the lowest common denominator. We are so determined at all costs to avoid having a disagreement on anything significant at conference (or for that matter anywhere else) that too often we end up saying nothing political at all. For the same reason that nobody really disagrees with a lot of our positions, nobody really much agrees with them either – because they don’t really say anything.

If we are to make progress, we have to be prepared to take a different approach. We need to get used to defining clear political choices and then jumping off the fence as we plump firmly for one rather than the other, instead of always using our undoubted skills for finding a compromise.

We have to take a clear decision about what our overall political approach is, and then spend the next four years ensuring that our policies flow from that. As well as making our policies more consistent across different areas, more importantly this will answer the question that the electorate are asking: what, underneath it all, do you stand for? They are more interested in this than our specific proposals for how we would regulate the widget industry – and given that a General Election is a choice about which group of people and ideas will run the country, they are right to be.

Answering it and defining a clear overall political approach will hopefully make some people happy – but it will make others, including some within our own party, unhappy. But to put this in terms of our discussions at Conference – which must be the forum where we thrash this out – it is more important that most of the people in the hall are happy, and some are unhappy, than that both groups, plus the journalists, are so uninterested in the whole thing that they are in the bar instead.

All this is quite a significant cultural shift for us as a party.

Among other things, as we put our political position to the fore, we need to be prepared to back this with up resources. At all levels of the party we are all inclined to think that because no-one reads our policy papers, any spare money that comes our way, say, should be put into employing a campaigns organiser rather than someone to work on policy or politics. I’m the last person to suggest that more detailed policy papers are what we need – but if it is how clearly we define our political position, and how hard we ram it down people’s throats that will determine our success at the next election, then that surely needs to be the priority for resources too.

If we do this, and do it right, we can raise our eyes from the near horizons of whether this or that seat that we ought to have taken years ago will finally fall next time, and be more ambitious.

After all, building on our result this May, if we can persuade just another one or two voters in ten that they like our political position, we will at last be in a position to put our ideas into practice.