Not actually to have won the Hartlepool by-election may concern the Liberal Democrats little when they reflect upon the significance of the Tory humiliation in the vote. Indeed, if the wilder commentators were to be believed, a Lib-Dem vistory at Hartlepool would have fatally undermined Mr Blair's leadership of the Labour party, and since the Prime Minister is a great electoral asset to the Lib-Dems they must be grateful to have avoided such a Phyrric victory. Their party is the great beneficiary of the Blair fall from grace, sweeping up hundreds of thousands of disaffected Labour votes nationally that are never going to go towards the Conservative opposition. These votes would be in danger if the Labour leadership changed.
Satisfied, as they must be, with their monopolisation of the anti Iraq war vote, the Lib-Dems are surely now hoping that the eclipse of the Tory vote at Hartlepool by UKIP will push the Conservative party even more to the right. By picking a fight with UKIP the Tories would be going after votes that the Lib-Dems can't aspire to; but the centrist ground they would abandon in this lurch to the right is fertile Lib-Dem territory to which the new, hard-edged Liberalism trailed at the party conference is designed to appeal.
It is a truism to observe that elections are lost by incumbent parties rather than won by the pretenders, but the Lib-Dems have suffered from the third-party predicament of needing two other parties to play losing hands simultaneously if they were themselves to go through. With the Tories still nowhere and Labout reeling from the fall out from Iraq, it's perhaps not surprising that Lib-Dem strategists are rubbing their hands...
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