So I’ve been thinking and I think the way to come out winning the last of the three debates, this Thursday, is to say something dramatic and new.

The first debate was obviously the game changer. People had the chance to see that there was a third real option, they liked it, as few as 1 in 10 people decided to switch to it, and the rest is history.

The second debate was always destined to be the quiet one - neither the first or last chance to see the leaders, supposedly focussed on foreign policy (though if you had tuned in hoping for some actual discussion of foreign policy issues you would have been fairly confused), and it was on the subscription channel (Sky). And indeed all it did was really confirm the impressions of the first one, just with Cameron behaving a bit more like Clegg, and Brown attacking Clegg instead of agreeing with him.

So what strategy for the third one? We’ve now had 3 hours of being able to watch these men and surely by now people have a pretty clear impression of what they think of them. Bar a few more tinkerings with the acting and the nuances of positioning which may tip things slightly in one direction or the other, we can’t really expect people to form a radically different view of the three men from their behaviour this time.

The only two ways it seems to me that the final debate could really change the position again, are these.

First, is the one we always knew about: that a leader could just make a brief and terrible mistake by saying something they really didn’t mean to. A few slipped up words could so easily have an impact out of all proportion to their actual significance, in giving the impression of that leader as incompetent, or really intending to do something that they have denied. Clearly all the participants will want to avoid this way of making their performance in the last debate memorable!

The only other way, it seems to me, is to say something new. Not a new major policy position - at this stage in the campaign that would simply give the impression that their manifesto isn’t a firm plan at all, but something flexible which they’re willing to change just to get a good headline. We have seen hints of this already with Cameron’s instant commitment on alleged cuts in last week’s debate (in response to Brown’s challenge), or Brown’s commitment on NHS funding to the RCN yesterday. At this stage, changing a policy position of any significance does considerably more harm than good.

But there may be other elements which a leader can throw out there, which are both new to the campaign, and actually important (suddenly deciding that you don’t like the phrasing of the commitment on marine biology on page 427 of a rival’s manifesto is not really going to cut it).

This could be a significant attack on one (or both) of your opponents. This needs to be something new and major, which may be a challenge at this stage in the campaign. But there may perhaps be new ways of putting this, particularly if it’s about their political positioning, rather than a policy. Labour is sure to try some version of this, along the lines of “Vote Clegg, Get Cameron”. Cameron will surely also try to sell a line which boils down to broadly “Vote Clegg, Get Brown”. Neither of these are very new - though if Nick is able to come up with an imaginative response to them which is not just the bathtub defence (”They’re both just the same, like squabbling children in the bath: vote Clegg and get Clegg”) then this may qualify as a killer line.

Or it could be something about their own positioning. Any of the three leaders proclaiming that in the event of a hung Parliament they’d be prepared to work with one of their rivals, but not the other one, would certainly qualify as this, but I doubt very much it’s going to happen.

But something about the way they would govern might do it.

Something which is a radical way of putting something which is already in their manifesto, perhaps implying they would go even further along a road already set out in principle in their manifestos, might do it.

All the parties have certainly left plenty enough room for more detail in their plans for sorting out the nation’s finances that they could outline more detailed plans here without being inconsistent with what they’ve already said.

And of course a good emergency would be ideal, allowing the leaders to give a distinctively different response to their rivals, and allowing them to start from a blank sheet of paper, relatively unconstrained by what they’ve said before.

It could be lots of things. It just has to be new, important, and not obviously inconsistent with anything they’ve already said.

This may not be particularly easy at this stage of the campaign. But it is surely the only way to use the last debate to give your popularity a real upwards boost, beyond the impression that the public already has of you.

I confess that I can’t really fathom what Labour’s campaign strategy has been this week. Ever since the first debate last week they seem to have been content to focus on taking David Cameron down, even if that benefits the Liberal Democrats rather than themselves. Is this just simple cynicism that even coming in third in the public vote, they could still have enough MPs to form a fairly stable government? Surely it can’t be – the British public’s lack of interest in their extraordinary voting system is great, but a party coming in third, with just 27% of the vote, and still forming the government just feels to me as if it would test the British public’s patience too far. I really can’t see a government formed on that basis lasting very long, and I can’t imagine that Messrs Brown and Mandelson would think so either.

No – to listen to Labour figures, all last week but especially this morning, condemning the attacks on Nick Clegg , it sounds as if they really aren’t worried because they think the Lib Dems will simply be so delighted to have the chance to go into government with them, that it is all a done deal. The only thing they need to do is to prevent the Conservatives having a proper majority, and they will get to stay in government.

This really is extraordinary. If this really is what they think, then they simply do not seem to have discerned the very basic insight that if Liberal Democrat MPs and members had wanted to support a Labour government, then they would have joined the Labour party. If you want, as Chris Huhne put it this morning, a cushy route to government, then you do not join the Liberal Democrats.

Liberal Democrat criticism of what this Labour government has been doing over the last thirteen years is not just grandstanding, it’s actually because we think they are wrong.

And Julian Glover at the Guardian makes this point extremely well.

But the extent of this delusion really does amaze me. The most startling appearance of it to me of all – and I promise I am not making this up – came right at the start of the campaign. My wife and I were in a hospital, in the run-up to the birth of our daughter, almost three weeks ago. We found ourselves discussing with a consultant two possible medical courses of action. He decided that the best way of illustrating the point of having to accept a less-than-ideal outcome, was to compare it to the Liberal Democrats’ prospects in the Election. As he explained, the Liberal Democrats might want to form a government, but they would be willing to support a government of another party as the best chance they were going to get.

In the context of discussing obstetric options, this was truly surreal. In the context of the election campaign, the idea that the Liberal Democrats – sympathetic though they may be to a one or two of the things that a tired and directionless Labour government has done – want to support it to remain there, is just wrong.

One of the things that I’ve been interested to note over the last few days, is that once the post-debate Lib Dem surge happened, their share of the vote pretty much stabilised at about 28-32%. While it’s obviously mathematically possible that this is a different 28-32% of people each day, it’s surely more likely that there is a relatively stable group of people who – at least this week – would vote Lib Dem.

I must confess I was a bit surprised by this – as I had kind of assumed that the rise itself would “liberate” a few more people to feel that a Lib Dem vote was no longer wasted, and so they too would give it a try. This is surely implicit in the whole “wasted vote” argument – if when the Lib Dems actually are doing really well, this doesn’t cause more people to take them seriously, this implies that their share of the vote has in fact never been historically depressed by the “wasted vote” argument, as campaigners of all parties believed.

So I was interested this afternoon to see the latest BBC’s “poll of polls” tracker page. It shows that I’ve got it slightly wrong.  What this shows is that the debate immediately triggered a sharp rise in the Lib Dem vote, from perhaps 21 to 29%. But it also shows that over the four days since hitting 29%, it has continued to meander slowly upwards, now to 31%.  This implies that there is indeed some kind of snowball effect – albeit for the moment limited. If there were no further debate tonight, then I’d expect this to continue to rise over the next day or two – to perhaps 32% - since the dates the BBC uses are those of poll publication, not of the fieldwork. After that, who knows? There surely does have to be quite quickly a correction from the fairly ridiculous hyperbole about Nick Clegg that has been going around. I’m a longstanding very firm Nick supporter – and his performance last week is almost exactly the reason that I and many others backed him so vigorously for the leadership in 2007 – but even I do not believe that he somehow combines the leadership skills of Winston Churchill and Julius Caesar, together with the forensic and brilliant debating abilities of Socrates and Charles James Fox.

But of course there is another debate tonight, which has the potential to change the picture all over again. It could set the Lib Dems off on another major leap upwards. Nick could say the wrong thing just once and that push us all the way back down to 20% again, or lower. The lightweight one or the overly-heavyweight one could say something which becomes the story, pushing their own share of the vote significantly either up or down. One thing we do know is that the media look for a story from the debate, which then reinforces itself as the story, only very loosely based on what actually happened (yes I think Nick did best last week, but it was not the kind of Lib Dem triumph and Labour and Tory disaster which you would think it was if all your information on it had come from any media source since, say, Saturday).

My guess is that tonight won’t do any of these things. We have had one General Election Prime Ministerial debate in this country, and it completely changed the game. I think it would be very rash to assume that they will all do that. I think the fact that that was the first real chance for voters to see all three Prime Ministerial candidates together was what really mattered, and particularly to get a proper look at the third party for the first time. I expect the impact of the remaining two debates (and tonight especially) to be possibly significant, but much more limited.

But of course we will see…

I keep reading comments which take it as accepted fact that the Bones commission report, and by extension the party leader, is about centralising power within the party and reducing democracy within it.

Now, while this may be the perception of people who haven’t actually followed the report’s progress carefully (and it seems to me at the moment that the number of people who have actually read the report is in inverse proportion to the number who insisted furiously over the summer on their right to read it!) I think anyone has actually read even the summary of it would accept that much of it isn’t about this at all, but about making other, much more operational matters within the party, work better.

But one proposal: the creation of a Chief Officers Group or COG (or in fact more accurately a slight formalisation of this existing loose grouping) does seem to have given to some the impression of greater centralisation. And I accept that on the face of it, there does seem to be a prima facie case here.

But once you actually look at the situation, in fact this isn’t my analysis of this development at all - and I’ll give two reasons why not.

Firstly, the entire Bones report makes no proposals whatsoever about the party’s process for making policy (with the arguable exception of a specific proposal relating to spring conference, which would not affect the fundamentals at all, and I get the impression is now anyway gradually being withdrawn).

The existing process, in which policy is made by conference, and the process is managed and led by an elected Federal Policy Committee (FPC), will continue, just as it does now.

This is important. While the questions of how we run ourselves as a party are obviously important, the reason we are actually in politics is in order to make proposals and change things - or in other words, policy matters. And the decisions about where we stand as a party and what we are proposing, will not be subject to any greater centralisation whatsoever, but will still come to conference just as before.

So to repeat: not one word in the Bones report implies changing the party’s procedures for deciding our policies.

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I’m pretty much a hardliner on the action we need to take to improve representation and engagement of ethnic minorities at senior levels within our party. Quite simply, if we want to aim to be a party of government then we have solve this problem, in our own narrow self-interest as a party - let alone because it is fair and will lead to better governance of Britain. The various ’soft’ strategies we have followed for achieving this - for example to encourage more BME candidates, and support them better, simply haven’t worked. Just take a look at our benches in any Parliament or any party committee. So even if those were the right strategies before, if we want results then we now need to take ‘hard’ action.

I suspect the ‘diversity premium’, through which the Bones commission recommended that any target seat selecting a BME candidate should receive £10K extra, may become something of a test for where people stand on this. I see all the problems with this, but I firmly support it (and I also don’t think that it should be extended also to other under-represented groups too, such as the disabled, for reasons I’d be happy to go into further. I’ve done a lot of work to promote access within the party for people with all kind of disabilities, but basically I think that in this case we have a specific problem with BME candidates which needs to be solved).

One of the many events that I would have liked to get to last week in Bournemouth, but was unable to for simple pressure of having too many of them, was the launch of a new Diversity Engagement Group (DEG). Now, over the last few years, autumn conferences have seen new initiatives launched to get more BME candidates, at a rate of approximately one a year. The teams behind most of them have worked hard, and some have achieved things - I applaud those who have put a lot of effort into them.

But, to be blunt, they haven’t succeeded in cracking the problem. What makes this one different is that it is being led by the party’s Deputy Leader (and indeed current god) Vince Cable. I have high hopes that this will give it a quantum leap higher chance of actually identifying the problems and being able to agree and implement solutions with the relevant people. The fact that Vince is leading sends the right signals that the party leadership has decided that it really does have to take some effective action on this pronto. I look forward to seeing - soon - what it achieves.

Over at Lib Dem Voice, they have launched a campaign against the - well, what to call it? - well, the simply untrue nonsense written about Lib Dem conference by newspapers and broadcasters. I’m very glad that they’ve taken this up and I hope it has an impact.

I still remember vividly my genuine confusion at going home after my first party conference to read the newspapers of it that my parents had kept, and not recognising the event that I’d been at. It felt completely bizarre. Had I really been at a different event? Quite soon, though, and for several years, that turned to frustration and anger that whatever happened at conference - whether we had approved a new overarching policy strategy, or a striking new departure in a particular direction, or anything else, that all that they ever wrote was that the leader’s authority was on the line as they faced a challenge, and that the whole event had been “dominated” by some wildly over-interpreted chance remark made by a senior figure, that almost nobody actually at the conference had even been aware of. These, along with endless obsession with how we related to the other two parties have formed the press’ staple stories ever since about party conference: you can pretty much cut and paste the articles from one year to the next, with just the precise detail of this year’s issue inserted in the blanks.

Finally, I simply came to expect it, and didn’t even really notice it any more. This year was the fifteenth autumn conference that I have attended, and what brought this home to me was reading the very same piece in the Independent that Stephen writes about here, without even really noticing that it talked complete rubbish - it’s simply what I expected now. Only when I saw his piece did I realise what complete nonsense it was, and that he’s absolutely right to be indignant about it. I hope others pick up the general point too and it would be a real achievement if it can get articles written which actually represent what happened at the event.

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I’ve written already about the contest to be the next President of the party, and as anyone who has read that piece will have gathered, I don’t naturally warm to the idea of an Opik presidency.

But before making the choice of how I vote, I would like to hear from the candidates what it is that they would propose to use the job actually to DO.

The formal powers of the party President are certainly not extensive. But it is an opportunity to put some things on the agenda, and take them forward within the party, and within parameters you can have an impact.

Different Presidents have approached it differently. And I certainly think they can be most effective by identifying just one or two main priorities as President. If you spend your two years in that position focussing on one or two big things, then I think you can really put them on the agenda and achieve some progress. Navnit Dholakia achieved this, simply by raising the profile of ethnic minorities within the party. He did this very effectively and I think it is what people remember his Presidency for.

Simon Hughes has approached the role differently - the positive thing that stands out to me most from Simon’s four years has been the way in which he has linked up different parts of the party with each other. The President has an ex officio place on most major party committees, and Simon has very actively engaged in them, and used the linkage which he in that role is able to provide, very positively.

The Bones Commission report seems to me to provide a timely opportunity for the candidates to set out their stall. The remit of its report is so wide that between its covers lie almost every issue that a President might want to take up.

So it would be good to know the candidates’ views on it. Do they support it? If there are some bits they don’t think are quite right, what are they? Which chapters or sections might they really want to take up as priorities?

In some ways its still early days for this election, but in effect it has already been running for a year. It’s time to hear some actual proposals from the candidates!

Over the last year Lembit Opik MP and Baroness (Ros) Scott have been running campaigns for the election which has now finally formally started, to be the next President of the Liberal Democrats.

But the campaigns they have been running have been so different that it really feels more like they have been standing in different elections.

Ros stole a march at autumn conference last year by having her team hand out “I’m 4 Ros” badges before anyone had even really realised there was a presidential election coming up (at that point we didn’t know that we’d have another leadership election to get through before this one!). And she’s spent the year since getting widely around the party, travelling all around the country speaking at regional conference and local party events, starting her own blog and a Facebook group with more than 300 members, writing articles in party publications, and generally getting herself seen as much as possible around the party. I’d say it was a classic good internal party election campaign, and very effectively run by Ros and the man she’s married this year, “party bureaucrat” (his words!) Mark Valladares. CORRECTION: A number of people have been in touch to point out that Ros’ campaign team is in fact this group. Apologies. Anyway, I congratulate them on it!

Lembit’s campaign, on other hand, at least as far as it’s reached my attention, has mostly comprised telling some journalists that he’s planning to stand for the post, resulting in one or two pieces like a full (but not very flattering) profile in the Observer a couple of months ago - combined with his usual round of activities in the party, in his spokesman and Welsh roles, as well of course as his celebrity activities, concluding in the end with the break-up of his engagement to a former Cheeky Girl.

Most people’s view is that of the two, Ros has really done the work to ‘earn’ winning this role.
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