I spent half my childhood and early adulthood in cathedrals so I do have some idea of the challenges of running one, and also how common it is for people to smoke in them (not very). So I was sorry to see that English cathedrals seem to have allowed themselves to be used as ammunition in the attack on the government’s nanny statism. This won’t do the perception of cathedrals or churches as modern places of worship where normal people might want to go, any good at all, which I think is regrettable.

The row has arisen because of the introduction of the smoking ban in public places on 1 July, which require them to put up a sign saying that it is against the law to smoke in cathedrals or churches. You can certainly make the case that this is unnecessary, but the idea that it is a real problem, or in the words of the Bishop of Fulham “stark staring mad”, seems to me to be nonsense. Every public entrance to a church or cathedral has a noticeboard, which could very easily accommodate a sign no larger than a piece of A4 paper - without taking such prominence as to dominate the entrance of the monarch to Westminster Abbey during the next coronation service, as was raised during the Today programme this morning (again by the Bishop of Fulham, I think).

The irony is, of course, that it’s quite right that this government is entirely nanny-statist, and when the church sometimes attacks them for that then I think that can be very helpful - but there really are some rather more important examples of this than churches being required to put a piece of A4 paper on their noticeboards. I do think it’s regrettable that churches and cathedrals have given their name to this rather silly story.

Last Tuesday I was invited to a speech by Oliver Letwin entitled Do Cameron Conservatives have a theory? In the end I couldn’t go but it didn’t matter too much as the speech ended up getting quite a bit of coverage

A lot of people have had some fun ridiculing it because some of the language he uses, quoting some of his more technical wording, and Blair at PMQs mocked his reference to Marx as probably being a reference to Groucho - a highly sophisticated gag that surely must have taken him hours to think up.

He did start off using some very technical language indeed, but as he explained - and as even Simon Hoggart accepted - he was explicitly doing that in a somewhat self-mocking way, precisely to make a point about the nature of use of political language.

And opposition politicians who have mocked that language should also possibly stop to think for a moment and wonder if they’ve been had. So far the main criticism of Cameron has been that what he says hasn’t had any substance. Now they are actively helping the Tories to publicise the fact that Conservative ideology can indeed be explained in long and technical words. I’m sure Cameron doesn’t want everyone to think his theory is incomprehensible, but the publicity this speech has got has done a lot to counter the impression that Conservative ideology is entirely lacking in substance. This interpretation is reinforced by Iain Dale saying in the Telegraph that he needs to translate this explanation of their ideas into “language that non-Oxbridge Old Etonians are able to understand” - aiming to create a sort of general impression that Letwin knows what the Conservatives think, and if we haven’t just managed to understand it, then that’s we haven’t been paying enough attention or we’re not clever enough.

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Today I watched Tony Blair deliver his resignation speech. He demits office as he took it up, certainly knowing how to pull the country’s heartstrings.

Electability is far from guaranteed for Labour, and a lot of their ability to win in the last ten years has come from Tone doing what he did today.

You could almost hear Labour party members around the country thinking that they won’t get that from Gordon Brown, and starting to wonder what they’ve done in being so keen to get rid of him”¦

Golly…it really is true what they say about the internet and blogosphere allowing anyone to come from nowhere and yet suddenly contribute to the debate. Until last Friday the most frequent visitor to this blog was the googlebot (ie a machine), kept company mainly by my family, trying to keep up with what I’m doing.

And then as a result of my post on the local election results I had more than 400 hits over 5 days, many referred here by some quite well known political blogs. What a change!

Well, the good thing about the fact that some people are dissatisfied with the party’s showing in Thursday’s elections is that the party is now being ambitious for us to succeed seriously at a national level - in the past too many people have been happy simply to be a third party in opposition. That seems to have changed.

But those who say the results were awful do need to take a serious look at some context. When I joined the Lib Dems in 1990 we were down in the low single figures in the polls, and for most of the 1990s we were happy to be somewhere around the mid-teens. The average poll rating since then has climbed to around 20%, perhaps a touch more. At the 2005 General Election we scored 22%.

In this context complaining about the 26% showing we scored in the local elections in England on Thursday, hardly seems reasonable. Although it’s true that we often do slightly better in local elections than general elections (for example in last year’s locals we scored 27%), 26% is clearly not the disaster that some are claiming it to be.

On Thursday there were losses in some places, but gains in others: I was personally particularly pleased to see that we gained for the first time a foothold in West Bridgford in Rushcliffe, with a highly impressive 26.4% swing from the Conservatives to us - something we tried and failed to do when I was the PPC there in the run up to the 2001 General Election.

And when comparing the number of councillors and councils won and lost, we need to remember what the benchmark was: the 2003 local elections, when those up for re-election on Thursday were elected, were some of our best results, following as they did immediately after the original invasion of Iraq. To those who think the party’s poll ratings must always go in only one direction: sorry, it just doesn’t work like that.

Yes, these results will not be quoted in the party’s history as one of our great historic steps forward: they were indeed a small step in the wrong direction. But those who think they are some sort of disaster really do need to get a grip.

And those who are calling again for the party to think about changing its leadership as a result are very wide of the mark indeed. Spending the next several months navel-gazing and focussing on internal matters would be absolutely the wrong way to try and take the party forward following these results. Ditching your leader every year and every time you get a poll outcome that isn’t perfect is the sure way to political failure (just look at the Conservatives over the last ten years).

But more importantly some people talk as if there were some great crowd of new and different candidates who would stand for the party leadership, who have suddenly appeared from somewhere since last year’s contest. This is obviously nonsense. Yes, I guess the runner-up from last year’s leadership election would stand again. But I don’t imagine the candidate who came third would do so again and other MPs (including Clegg) wouldn’t stand this year for the same reasons as they didn’t last year.

There is no reason for the party to commit regicide for the second time within 18 months. And especially not when - and saying this isn’t sticking your head in the sand, it’s stating a fact - this is historically a more-than-perfectly-respectable showing.