So what convinced 2,000+ people to vote for him? Well, he didn’t have the resources to deliver a Focus leaflet every six weeks or three months. So he knocked on every door, every year until he had spoken to everyone who answered. And then he started again, whilst still being an active trade unionist and a leading Eurocommunist in the CPGB and managing the casework. It took 25 years of slog, but he won, just at the moment his party dissolved (literally).

Liberal Democrat candidates probably don’t need to slog as much as John Peck did. Or they need to slog as much for fewer years. Or be smart and cultivate local journalists because they have interesting stories. But the background story from most LibDem MPs is that they inherited infertile ground and learned how to till it.

The flood of leaflets at an election campaign isn’t new. Chris Rennard didn’t event it, nor Andrew Ellis before him. Dig out your old ALC campaigning booklets and review. To be effective, the flood of leaflets has to be about a candidate who interests voters and who is “useful”. The rules change slightly at by-elections, but useless candidates are rarely elected by leaflet campaigns.

But I think it was unfortunate Alix muddied the picture of her original statement by a bad choice of words and left her conclusion open to interpretation. She used the word ‘change’, which is such an open-ended word that it confirms every ‘progressives’ pet prejudice.

Where Stu says it’s now ‘time to move on’ this suggests that he intends to rip up the old rulebook and start again from scratch with a complete revolution in campaign tactics. Frankly I don’t believe this is what anybody truly means. And this divergence of meaning is IMO what caused the kurfuffle.

Instead, perhaps a better word would have been ‘adapt’ or ‘reform’, which suggests we won’t ‘throw the baby out with the bathwater’ (how many times will that cliche be repeated!) and will ‘learn the lessons’ etc etc.

It seems to me that those on either side of this debate are the fired-up young bucks raring to go and the hardened campaigners who advise a touch of caution over all-out haste.

It’s important that we don’t allow ourselves to become too polarised over things like this because that would result in entrenching divisions on more strategic long-term issues such as suggested in James’ post. If distrust is allowed to grow between the leadershiip and the federal party then it will paralyse any attempts to make the positive changes in the areas (such as highlighted).

For the purposes of mass consumption it seems that the general campaign tactics has been condensed into the meassage ‘deliver leaflets’, and it seems that any of the caveats about quality and quantity are beginning to become obscured by the mists of repitition down the years. This is natural problem for any organisation as it passes information on from one generation to the next and grows, but it is not one that is uinsurmountable.

We all understand the reasoning and we are all in general agreement, but in order to ensure everyone is pulling together in the same direction we need to remember that both the bredth and the depth of our efforts contribute to our successes.

BTW, can we get rid of this ‘rennardism’ tag and give it back it’s older ‘grimondism’ tag. Let’s not forget the latter was built on an adapted version of the former, or that the LibDem reputation for by-election success is based on the mother of them all – the Liberal success at Orpington.

Those of us with memories of the Liberal SDP Alliance can recall many examples of the SDP sitting out by-elections. Well, almost. They used the free postal delivery for a glossy personal manifesto and delivered another boring leaflet. They did all of the boring things that had got them elected as a Labour or Conservative MP, and promptly got hammered. From 1983, the only time the SDP won was when they adopted Liberal campaigning techniques.

Like the evolution vs. intelligent design argument, this is an asymetrical debate. To correct that, we need to hear your hypothesis not merely your scepticism.

Not being a Lib Dem, I can’t say what I would do going forward if I was – all I was trying to point out was that anybody sitting there telling you that leaflets are tried and tested and proven to work is plain crazy – there’s no evidence for their effectiveness, so far as I’ve seen.

Also, as much as I’ve enjoyed Nich Starling’s election coverage, he most certainly HAS been treating the number of leaflets through his door as a barometer of the strength of each party’s campaign. Just have a look back through and you’ll see what I mean.

Anyway, you’re probably right – Rennard has done a lot for your party, but as I saw Alix point out somewhere, when the other party’s ape your tactics they lose their effectiveness, so you almost definitely need to move on. And, as I see it, ‘online’ isn’t the answer either. It’s just another tool in the arsenal.