john leech didnt just conduct a campaign though. john spent years at grass roots level working for his constituents in a very active and vocal way, turning up at local meetings in a way that labour has forgotten how to.
I know a lot of people who voted for him. Almost all are ex-labour voters who got fed up with labour's perceived arrogant attitude at local levels, and turned to people like john simply because they tried harder.
If you have residents' meetings, parents' groups etc who organize themselvers because they care about those issues, who find that week in and week out the lib dems come along and join in and then go and fight their cause for them in council chamber, whilst labour forgets about them till election time, then you have a grassroots support amongst those people most likely to vote, which labour, certainly in south manchester, has forgotten about.
Then onto that you graft the effects of the iraq war, university fees, health service worries, and you have keith bradley out on his arse.
Local labour activists sit there , scratch their heads, bleat on about some individual items in campaign leraflets which nobody else but them read and which they didnt like, and completely miss the point of why they lost so spectacularly.
Then, instead of a bit of humility after the election, and acceptance of mistakes, you get halfwits like chris paul bombarding the local press with anal-retentive incoherent drivel which makes the labour party look like a bunch of arrogant witless bad losers, instead of the peoples' party that it should be.
No doubt he thinks he is being very clever. He just makes the labour party look stupid.
You guys lave a lot to learn if you want to win back hearts and minds in this area.
