From what I’ve seen above, this looks like another of those typical Lib Dem dirty tricks campaigns where they appear out of the woodwork and claim that the Tory MP/council is “deeply unpopular” and thus the Lib Dems are bound to win the seat. There is never any evidence to back that up and the results when they come in 9 times out of 10 show that the claims were complete and utter nonsense from start to finish.

“The incumbent MP is not liked much locally”

If this is true, why has the constituency continued to return him at election after election for the last 30 years? Why is he retiring now at a time of his own choosing and why have the Lib Dems completely failed to get near to winning the seat even at a time when the Tories were deeply unpopular nationally and lost three elections by heavy margins?

Frankly, even if what you say about Butterfill were true, he is not the candidate at the next election anyway. With a new fresh candidate and with the party now surging ahead in the polls, it looks like Conor Burns will hold this seat with an increased majority come the next election. My prediction is 6,000+

As for this ridiculous suggestion that the polls are slipping away from the Tories nationally; lets just remember that we have just had three weeks of Tory bashing at the left wing conferences, and the Tories are still stable at around 41%. This is only a few points below where we have been for most of the past year and even at the height of this so called ‘bounce’ all the polls are still pointing to a Tory victory at the next election. True, its not quite the 20 point leads we’ve had in the last couple of months, but that was never going to hold up anyway. Let’s just get things into perspective.

I agree.