It remains to be seen whether or not the Lib Dem by-election machine – in it’s current form – has well and truly had it’s day. Either way, this is Chris Rennard’s last campaign, and fingers crossed this means that the party will start thinking about ways of willing by-elections that don’t depend on physical quantity of leaflets put through letterboxes.

According to the Gospel of Rennard, that’s how you win. You literally put more leaflets through doors than anyone else. Meanwhile the Tories are up to 12 leaflets, while the Lib Dems are slightly pipping them to the post at 13.

I, for one, will cheer the end of Brute Force campaigning and the death of our leafleting ringmasters. Truth is that the most attractive candidate to the electorate nearly always wins irrespective of resources, and being able to spend more money (or, at least, have the most volunteers) changes the results of elections by little more than 1%, according to those renegades at Freakonomics. Lib Dem candidates – once fresh faced “normal people” battling hard on local issues without letting boring old politics get in the way – now seem more like any other wannabe politician.

We continue to struggle for relevance and identity, and there’s no sign that this is about to change.

Still, another question hovering over Norwich is the fate of LPUK’s first ever election test. What is almost certain is that LPUK won’t be returning an MP this time – sorry guys. In By-Elections there are nearly always tiny fringe parties that ‘no-one’s ever heard of,’ and it seems there’s a sort of voter blindness when it comes to any party they’ve never heard of.

So the question is whether or not LPUK’s online presence translates into a slightly better than average result for a fringe party? I suspect that they’re going to be disappointed, although no doubt they’ll be thrilled to have broken their electoral virginity.

Of course people will point to their result as evidence of the lack of interest in libertarianism in general. It’s not something that’s going to convince me. Lib Dems know from bitter experience that their policies are usually unpopular until they’re adopted by one of the other parties, and that’s down to our image and to our reputation.

The point is that the vehicle, in modern democratic politics, matters more than the actual policies. It’s one of those horrible realities, a divergence of what ought to be and what is.

Research done at the last general election pointed to high approval of Tory policies – until people found out the source of the policies. What this says to me is that image is still everything in politics – and that it’s going to take a lot more than blogs to break the monopoly of Social Democracy on British Politics. That goes double for me.

Update: Okay, so, funny how what I think are the most innocuous posts seem to cause the most trouble for me. First I didn’t credit Nich Starling for the leaflet count. Second I didn’t link the to source of the 1% statistic, which is here. A couple of people in the comments dispute this figure (which is fair enough, it’s based on research into US elections after all).

I’d argue the point about what really makes the difference – is it local sympathy to the party motivating activists to do a ‘Full Rennard’ or is it the ‘Full Rennard’ generating local sympathy? In hindsight it’s probably best not to talk about this sort of subject during an actual full bloodied campaign.

As it happens I don’t have the foggiest idea what the polling is for Norwich. I don’t even know who the favourites are. I don’t live in Norwich so as far as I’m concerned this is none of my business – I was more mulling about By-Elections in general rather than this specific one. Whether or not the Lib Dems have a chance of winning I will leave to people on the ground there – again I point you towards Nich Starling.

I apologise to fellow Lib Dems for my appalling lack of tribalism. Don’t be angry, my brain’s just not wired up that way. To make up for it, I’m willing to go leafleting for day next week. I need the exercise anyway.