Letter from Westminster

Written by Stephen Williams MP and published in Clifton Chronicle on Mon 8th May 2006

Jeremy Thorpe's most famous quip is "Greater love hath no man than to lay down his friends for his life." He was talking about Harold Macmillan's panic cabinet reshuffle in the early 1960s. In the aftermath of a terrible few weeks for Labour Tony Blair has spared neither friends nor critics in the restructuring of his government.

I said in my last column that Charles Clarke's days appeared to be numbered. But no one predicted the demotion of Jack Straw. Just as I'd got used to the ministerial team in Education, they get moved on. Rather than steady Labour's nerves these moves seem likely to cause more

instability as everyone waits for the departure of TB himself.

The reshuffle seemed all the more of a panic gesture, being announced within hours of Labour's drubbing in the local elections. The Conservatives made most of their gains in the outer London suburbs. They are still an irrelevance in the great cities of the north. In Bristol they are still firmly in third place.

For my own party it was a night of mixed fortunes. We made some spectacular gains in inner London but these were balanced by losses elsewhere. Overall, we made a very slight improvement on the last time the same seats were fought four years ago. The media have billed this as a disappointing start for Sir Ming Campbell. Just a few months ago the same pundits were predicting a disastrous year for the Lib Dems.

In Bristol we needed to make four gains to have a majority on the council. I spent a great deal of my time in the last six weeks trying to make this happen. In the end we gained two seats and lost a seat in south Bristol. In the north we came tantalisingly close, falling short in Kingsweston by thirty eight votes and in Horfield by just nineteen.

The Liberal Democrats are now clearly the largest party in Bristol with thirty three seats, ten more than Labour and twenty more than the Conservatives. But I'm obviously disappointed that we didn't finish more clearly ahead. Part of the reason for this is a clear sign of the progress that the party has made in Bristol. Four years ago Bristol had a Labour council and we were able to pick up easy protest votes. Now we are seen as part of the political establishment and the protest votes against the national government went to the greens and other fringe parties.

My political colleagues on the City Council inherited a terrible mess from Labour. Their first year of heading up a new administration has been spent stabilising the city's finances. Now we need to show that a Lib Dem led council can make a difference in transport, education and the environment.

I'll end with another political quote, from the former New York Governor Mario Cuomo, "Campaigning is poetry, government is prose." By the time of the next election my party's task is to present a pretty convincing essay on the transformation of Bristol.