Alan, I take your point. I'm simply pointing out why John Leech has a strong local following and a strong personal popularity with otherwise floating voters.
Anybody who jas been active locally in any campaign for any local issue in the last few years is likely to have found John Leech helping fight for the issue, and will be grateful that he did so.
Obviously he frequently will not have succeeded because many of those fights involve confrontation with a local Labour council. But people feel grateful that he helped, and, equally,feel antipathetic to the Labour council that they had to fight, especially when we got the feeling that we were being ignored by our local council for having dared vote Lib Dem and having had a Lib Dem councillor fight for our cause, creating the impression that the local council is only interested in its friends, not the entire electorate. That may be the wrong impression,nd it may even be exploited by Lib Dems, but it is how it feels to us on the ground. Like I said, Labour constantly shoots itself in the foot round here by not siding with the local electorate.
