John Prescott was always known for being, well, less academic than was average among Labour MPs. Not able to grasp complex issues, unable to put a sentence together and always blaming his far superior wife for everything from taking short car journeys to accepting peerages – those were his good points. However being the clown has worked for most Liberal leaders in my lifetime, and unlike them Prescott was a clear eyed thug – which you need in politics.

The problem with the clown act is that it starts to become real and the problem with clear eyed thugs is that they become destructive when they stop seeing as clearly. Calling Alan Milburn a “collaborator” is not doing the Labour Party any good, which I have no doubt that John Prescott loves deeply.

Britain needs a sensible opposition to the coalition, otherwise they will do what all unchallenged governments do and grow arrogant. This does not mean comparing them to occupying Germans. Particularly if you are the pro-Lisbon party – do you now see how silly it sounds?

There are sensible voices out there in Labour’s benches. Will Straw is calling for a Labour narrative on the structural deficit, Lord Myners has made an after the event speech in the House of Lords attacking the overspending and Ipswich’s own Kevan Lim attacked his party for the orgy of untruth that they were engaging in regarding the UK’s economic situation.

Do Ipswich Labour Party follow this self destructive course? If so many of them weren’t backing Ed Balls then we’d have less cause to worry.

From Kevan Lim:

Unfortunately your figures are wrong. The tory vote was 17543 as you say, but the labour vote was 16764. Thats significantly more than Chris Mole’s vote. However my main point was the lib vote variation between parlamentary and borough. So I don’t think you can say my point was wrong. Allowing for the switch by some labour and tory voters to fringe like green,bnp and ukip, their were numbers of labour and lib who voted for ben gummer and then went back to their usual political choice for the borough.

Kevan Lim is right and I’ve missed out Labour’s 912 votes in Bixley. This means that Labour actually scored 16,764 votes in the Borough which was 472 votes more than Chris Mole. This was about 3% of their borough vote and between a quarter and a fifth of Ben Gummer’s margin. I still think that this shows that there was not that much split ticket voting, although Kevan disagrees, arguing that the UKIP (and perhaps BNP) votes probably went to the Tories in the borough and so masking the Labour votes that went to Ben and back to Labour in the borough.

The collapse of the Liberal parliamentary vote is very important, and on that I don’t disagree with Kevan Lim. Their disastrous choice of Mark Dyson needs to be quickly acknowledged by the Liberal Democrats in Ipswich. There have been stories that he was getting rather tetchy with volunteers, these and other stories show that he needed to have some grounding in grass roots politics before going for being a Parliamentary candidate. I think a couple of stints of running for (Wandsworth) council should stop him making rookie mistakes. He’s clearly not a stupid man and seems quite well intentioned, but politics does not suit him and parachuting in to another seat won’t suit him either. Also, some electorates take kindly to carpet baggers, but not Ipswich.

I suspect a lot of the Liberal vote split between both Ben and Chris Mole as although Ben Gummer is probably the most Liberal Democrat friendly of the two candidates and there is a history of co-operation on the town, many Liberal Democratic voters are still anti-Tory. This will probably change with the economic climate, but the realisation of how bad things are has not really hit home yet.

However the psychological point that Chris Mole scored less well than his borough colleagues is very important, and could harm him in any reselection battle.

My main point still stands however – The decision makers in Ipswich Labour Party really seem to have seen this election as a fight to win the borough through concentrating effort in the marginal seats. To an outside observer this seems mad when there was a strong expectation that they could lose the Parliamentary seat, reflected in the betting markets. This seems like their fatal mistake (and not just because by losing Alexandra, they still are in a minority). Was it because they just didn’t believe the polls and the betting figures or did they just not think that saving the seat was that important – at least in the short term?

That’s not a question for me, I’ve no interest in Labour’s future electoral success. I suspect that those Labour supporting readers of this blog (I’ll exclude Kevan Lim, who has a clear grasp of what’s happened) either are too loyal, scared or nice to see what their local leadership has done.

[EDIT: Kevan Lim sets me right on the Labour borough figure, which missed out Bixley and puts Chris Mole a bit behind the Labour borough vote.]

There has been a lot of talk about personal and negative votes and how the party machines got different votes from the borough and national elections, both Kevan Lim and Ipswich Spy have made this point. They are mainly wrong.

Actually I get the following results for adding up the votes in the constituency wards, Conservatives 17,543 and Labour 15,852. This was done by adding the highest vote in Alexandra plus the vote for the party candidate in the other twelve wards. This is not an enormous difference from the Parliamentary vote where Ben Gummer got 18,371 and Chris Mole got 16,292. The difference is probably mostly made up of those Liberal Democrat voters in wards who are more prepared to switch to the least bad party in a close parliamentary election (there’s 3,389 more Lib Dem borough votes than parliamentary votes).

There were crossover votes, but they largely cancelled each other out.

Labour did better than their vote would have suggested in the borough elections not because they were getting a far higher vote but because they were targeting their effort in certain wards. The seem to have fought this as a borough election rather than a parliamentary election, fighting hardest in seats such as Bridge, Rushmere, Alexandra and Sprites and not piling up the votes in Gipping and Gainsborough in the same way that the Tories were doing in Bixley and Holywells. For Heaven’s sake they were fighting in Whitehouse, which makes no sense as Labour knew they were destined to come third in the North Ipswich parliamentary seat.

Did they do this because in their heart they thought the game was up, or that they thought the Tories couldn’t win the seat or that they could fight two elections at once? I doubt we’ll know the answer for sure for a couple of years and a couple of defectors.

With their loss in Alexandra meaning that they’ve been denied control of the council it looks like they’ve miscalculated twice over.

Kevan Lim the former deputy leader of Labour in Suffolk County Council, after a lifetime of voting Labour has decided to vote for Ben Gummer.

Despite the fact that he comes from a totally different political tradition from me (although I used to be a Labour activist, but years ago) he comes up with a couple of points that I wholeheartedly agree with:

1) Like it or not we are in a big hole with this deficit, and some painful things need to be done now
2) Ben Gummer’s strongest point is not that he’s a Tory but that he’s independent minded and, let’s be honest, more than a bit mouthy
3) Mark Dyson doesn’t understand Ipswich and it’s a mystery as to why the Liberals didn’t choose a local candidate

Kevan Lim firmly remains a man of the left, but he has switched because Ben Gummer will be a stronger voice for Ipswich – not because he’s suddenly fallen in love with the Conservative Party.

As well as being a Labour councillor in both Manchester and Ipswich, Kevan Lim has been a Labour member since he was eighteen and has voted Labour in every election since 1970. With that sort of pedigree it’s shocking, to say the least, that he’s considering who to vote for now, and it won’t be Labour.

He makes an interesting post in his blog where he lays down the frustration of the financially literate. Gordon Brown is saying that he will protect government spending, having full knowledge that he can do nothing of the sort. To me – although Kevan’s too much of a gentleman to say this – that is the textbook definition of a lie, and to make it the main plank of your election campaign is to be a liar and to make thousands of well-intentioned and honourable activists into liars. Most of them know that they are lying on every doorstep and with every leaflet, but they will keep on with this appalling leader and his appalling behaviour until times get better.

Kevan Lim seems to have had enough and to say to the world what the other Labour activists do not even want to themselves, the Labour campaign is based on a central lie.

All three main parties (and almost all the minor ones) are soft peddling the horror that’s to come, whoever gets in. Sure, the Tories tried to lay it out starkly for a while, but although they are still far more honest than the other parties they have rowed back.

Anyway, back to Kevan Lim, and here is his main point:

So blindly protecting public services as the government is stating during this election is both impossible due to the budget deficit crisis and also because it will be the ordinary working people of this country who will have to pay for the cost of inaction either through higher taxes and/or the ending of key public services.

Spot on. And this is more eloquent than George Osborne and Vince Cable have been throughout this campaign.