Comments on: Salisbury

By: Cogload

Cogload — Fri, 25 Mar 2011 12:35:18 +0000

They managed to stay in contention because of a decent candidate and the rural vote switching during council elections. This gave them the activists on the ground.

However in the current reviews this seat is undersized so I expect more of the hinterland to come through in the next 10-15 years before the mooted development to the north of the City at Old Sarum may even things out.

Nick Radford has written to the executive stating that he has no intention of standing again so a new LD candidate will have to be found.

By: Barnaby JL Marder

Barnaby JL Marder — Thu, 24 Feb 2011 08:31:03 +0000

Looking at the result here I’m a bit surprised that the LDs have managed to stay in contention, after their failure in 1997.

By: Cogload

Cogload — Thu, 24 Feb 2011 00:34:54 +0000

This seat will be radically different at the next election….

By: Joe James B

Joe James B — Tue, 01 Feb 2011 18:10:59 +0000

I’m not going to keep replying to them if they’re about that sort of thing
because I’m just encouraging more (as he pretty much admitted on the Witham thread).

(Tim does make good and informative posts aswell when he wants to,
which I do want to reply to).

I haven’t got out at Salisbury for many years, but used to stop off there on family holidays,
and go through more recently on the way to Lyme Regis for sea rowing.

This seat certainly seemed to suffer a swing to the Lib Dems perhaps as a result of the upsurge in the campaign or Labour tactical voting,
but now the Tories are closer to 50% than 40%, they should be ok.

By: H.Hemmelig

H.Hemmelig — Tue, 01 Feb 2011 17:36:16 +0000

It wouldn’t be so bad if Tim’s criticisms were accurate and if he treated all parties equally. The fact that he doesn’t just makes his criticisms look like Lib Dem partisan froth.

Robert Key certainly wasn’t particularly right-wing on most issues. For example, he was one of the few Tories to vote for an equal age of consent in 1994, and he was chair of the all-party group on preventing AIDS.

He was completely loyal to John Major on Europe.

By: Anthony Wells

Anthony Wells — Tue, 01 Feb 2011 14:55:09 +0000

Tim – I used to have you on pre-moderation because I couldn’t trust you not to tour around seats putting up comments about how personally dispicable you found the Conservative MP. You seemed to have got it out of your system so I took you off of moderation.

Please don’t start doing it again or I’ll have to go back to hand moderating all your posts.

By: John D

John D — Mon, 31 Jan 2011 18:32:51 +0000

Yes indeed. A murderer is a murderer.

By: Tim Jones

Tim Jones — Mon, 31 Jan 2011 17:10:27 +0000

‘To be fair there were some hard things to swallow as part of that agreement – such as setting murderers free.’

That’s true John – and assuming your a Unionist I very much hope you are referring to the murderers on the loyalist side as well as the IRA

I’m all for reconcilliation and with hindsight I don’t think anyone could argue that the Good Friday Agreement hasn’t been worth it – but I do wonder how necessary freeing people who had willfully murdered others was

By: John D

John D — Mon, 31 Jan 2011 17:05:23 +0000

“He even oposed the Good Friday Agreement when he was a shadow Northern Ireland spokesman.”

To be fair there were some hard things to swallow as part of that agreement – such as setting murderers free.

By: Tim Jones

Tim Jones — Mon, 31 Jan 2011 15:53:01 +0000

‘Which is surely why this seat is safer than it looks on paper.’

This seat is pretty safe for the Tories anyway

In 92 the Tories had a majority over the Lib Dems almost identicle to that in Winchester and yet whilst they took Winchester, they didn’t even come close here

Maybe they had a weak candidate as right-winger Robert Key never struck me as a particularly formiddable opponent – although he was obviously popular or rather, more popular than John Glen whose majority has been halved

but I agree that this is a lot safer for the Tories than it currently looks

Would not the swing make it one of the worst resukts for the Tories in 2010