Not a single person who I’ve talked to about the Liberal Democrats in this election (and there aren’t many, to be honest) has failed to comment on Andrew Cann, or to say how Cann would have run his campaign better.

Well there’s one exception, Mark Dyson, who makes no logical connection about going into the kitchen and standing the heat. He comments five times on one Ipswich Spy item criticising his leafleting operation.

To be fair it’s easier to comment on these blogs from Battersea.

When I heard that Nick Clegg was attacked by the Daily Mail recently it really seemed like a dog bites man story. God bless the Daily Mail, but it’s not the sort of paper that will look kindly on a Liberal Democrat. They may like the Democrat bit, but as far as Liberal bit, oh dear.

But when I heard that Nazis were involved I thought how did they manage that?

The story is actually a lot more damning about Nick Clegg, and the whole British political class, than it looks like from the outside. Essentially Nick Clegg took a case where a couple of German people claimed that they had been hounded out of a work place. However Clegg used it in an insane tirade against the British in general.

We have a “misplaced sense of superiority” due to our role in the Second World War and “delusions of grandeur”. He then said that the as a nation we “we need to be put back in our place”.

This was all said while he was a member of the European Parliament.

Forget about the Nazi stuff, it’s irrelevant. It’s the disgust with the people that he claims to want to represent. A disgust that is certainly not limited to the Liberal Democrats, and something I’ve heard from both Labour and Conservatives.

I think it was Nicholas Soames (not a classic outsider) who said that it shows that Nicholas Clegg had “the European view of Britain rather than the British view”.

Although Clegg was more extreme than many others, he is symptomatic of the contempt that the political class feel towards their employers, the British public. This is where Gordon Brown’s bigot comment comment comes from and that is where Mark Dyson’s comment about Ipswich being a provincial town came from.

They are a different class. They lie to us, they don’t like us and they think we should be grateful that we deem to represent us.

That’s why I think Ben Gummer is genuinely different. God knows I disagree with him on a lot, but he knows that his job is to represent us, not to act like minor nobility.

So it was wrong to call the Liberal Democrat Mark “Bristol” Dyson. Sorry Mark, I’ll call you Mark “Battersea” Dyson.

He is the only one of the ten candidates nominated, and nine candidates allowed, who does not live in Suffolk. According to his nomination (in PDF) he is listed as living at an “Address in the Battersea Constituency”. Everyone else either has an IP postcode or is listed at “Address in the Ipswich Constituency”.

It seems that Mark Dyson was parachuted in by the Liberal Democrat office over two local Liberal Democrat activists as they “weren’t experienced enough”, at least that’s according to a rather downcast Lib Dem activist I bumped into yesterday. So much for localism.

On his performance at the hustings, you wonder what they weren’t experienced enough for? Mentioning Vince Cable 27 times in an evening? Making the third candidate speech on election night? Operating a twitter account less than I operate a blog? Claiming that the port noise may not have been real? Saying stupid things about replacing global capitalism?

By the way his votedyson.com website is up.

Mark Dyson is plainly finding us to be dull.

After the hustings yesterday Mark Dyson went down to the Cock and Pie with two colleagues. A couple of the people who were at the hustings were sitting at the door.

So he goes up to the bar. “Do you serve any food?”

“No sir, we stop serving at nine.”

So Mark Dyson walks out, while he’s leaving he says to one of his colleagues “Is there anywhere in this town where I can get some food?”

No Mark, nor is there anywhere in this town that you can belittle it.

No one asked you to venture from Battersea, so stop moaning you carpetbagger.

So we said that Chris Mole’s website was a bit naff with its pledges being shown with the “Proof” watermark all through it, but now they’ve taken the page down.

Touchy! Perhaps its because he’s already broken one of these pledges.

The votedyson.com site is still not up. Perhaps the Liberal Democrats are waiting for after the election.

Chris Mole has put his pledges on line, but if you look carefully you’ll see that the word “Proof” is passed through the whole thing. Hint: That watermark means you shouldn’t publish it.

(No comment as to whether a taxpayer funded site should have Vote Mole literature all over it).

Meanwhile Mark Dyson STILL hasn’t got his votedyson.com website up, which shows everyone how seriously he’s taking Ipswich. So I guess I’ll be getting more hits for “Mark Dyson” and “Mark Dyson Ipswich”.

So after being a bit rude about the Invisible Mark, the Liberal Democrat candidate Mark Dyson, (and getting him to reply in Ipswich Spy) I thought I’d give him a call, so we arranged an interview for today. I think that this is his first interview of the campaign.

So how did it go?

Firstly I asked him about when his site will go up (the votedyson.com site is still on a parked domain as I write). He said that he didn’t have any Ashcroft cash so the Liberal Democrats had to do this themselves and that he was the man doing the website.

Then it was a question about what campaigning he had done in Bridge Ward. He hasn’t done any yet, at the moment he is looking at the town as a whole. Later on he will be campaigning ward by ward. There’s a meeting tomorrow at which they expect to fill the 70 seat meeting.

So I asked about a local issue that has been bothering people, the cement ship noise. Well he’s still got to be briefed fully on this. It wasn’t clear whether or not it was a genuine issue or whether it had been whipped by someone with an axe to grind about the port in general. He was not prepared to comment further until he had the full facts.

So I asked him what he thought was affecting Bridge or South West Ipswich in general. He said that the issues in the South West were likely to be the same as Ipswich as a whole. Unemployment was the number one issue with a 52% increase in unemployment in the last year in Ipswich. So Ipswich needed inward investment and should play to its strengths with a Waterfront that had made great strides and that reminded him very much of Bristol where he had a lot of knowledge.

Then there was the environment, that was a big issue – although he didn’t mention any axe grinding. He thought that there were too many cars in Ipswich and people should get out of their cars an onto buses which would be done through getting minibuses that could hop on and off at non-appointed stops.

So in short he would be fighting for the hospital, the jobs and the buses.

So I asked him about the buses. What was his opinion on that particularly the Ipswich Buses proposed partnership with Go Ahead?

Well he knew about Buses. When he was a regional TV correspondent in the North West of England he talked about it so much that they would joke about him being the buses correspondent. He’d seen metropolitan operations being picked off one by one by large operators and so the halfway house was very interesting. And why shouldn’t metropolitan services be efficient?

So I asked him about Wherstead Road bus services. He politely told me, not for the last time that he didn’t have answers on the very local issues.

So I asked him about a hot local issue, the housing offices. Was he in favour of their closing so that housing services should be delivered on the ground in the estates? He said that he wasn’t going to comment on that as he was going to learn about the big issues and go downwards. He had not yet been briefed on this issue so he did not want to talk out of line.

So I asked him what people were concerned about around the port. Flooding was an uncomfortable subject that people were talking about in whispers.

So would he be devoting time to the campaign in the next six weeks? Oh yes, 100%. Ipswich deserves a proper constituency MP. When asked whether he would move into the constituency he said that he was planning to do so any way – before he got selected – as his wife had roots here and with a young family this was a good place for a child to grow up.

So what were my views of this. Of course he sounds like a nice guy, who doesn’t? He’s also accessible and he knows some macro issues. But his grasp of local issues is remarkably sketchy for someone who wants to represent the town. I’ve no doubt he’ll find out more, but that’s not really the point.

Overall I got the feeling that he was like a Tory candidate in Liverpool or a Labour candidate in Surrey, someone who needs to get a box ticked before going on to the next level. I’ve no doubt he’ll sound quite good on discussion panels, particularly if there are not local issues coming up out of the blue.

There is already a candidate who is making a big issue about fighting for the constituency, and has actually shown some ability to do so. And Ben Gummer actually has a chance of winning the seat. Mark Dyson’s only point of difference with Ben Gummer seemed to be that Mark Dyson wasn’t a Tory, and while that will be good enough for some people I’ll be surprised if he pulls any surprise in this campaign.

The Liberal Democrat disappearing act in Ipswich is getting comical.

On Ipswich Spy, there’s a fantastic little reply from a Liberal Democrat on their fact that the Times is only giving the Lib Dems a 1% chance of winning Ipswich:

The only reason that Mark Dyson has come in at 1% is because no-one knows who he is. Once they meet him they’ll know that he is a thoroughly decent chap who will represent this town better than the career politician spending all his time with transport and the little boy only doing it coz daddy did.

Now how would they meet him? I thought I’d try to find somewhere where he would be. So I went to the Liberal Democats national site where they had a nice little profile of him, good start. So they had a Twitter account for him, so I went there. Four posts at the time of writing. The last post was on 27 March and he was selected on March 4. No posts between then. Trying hard. I wonder what his links to Battersea and Tooting Lib Dems are?

So back to the Lib Dem national site and they mention a website for Mark Dyson with the catchy title votedyson, only problem is – it’s a hosted site.

So I went to the Ipswich Lib Dems, surely they’d have something? They did have something about choosing Mark Dyson, but no meet the candidate page, like the Tories and Labour have. Perhaps they’d have something in their events page, a chance to you know, meet, the candidate. Well I could go to a committee meeting of the Liberal Democrats on 21st April, but there’s no guarantee that Mark Dyson would be there – and I’d have to be a member of the Liberal Democrats – which is rather expensive to meet a former local TV reporter even if I will find out that he will represent Ipswich better than anyone else.

So one month after he’s been selected there’s no publicised events, a Twitter account with four posts, no contact information on the local party site and no candidate site. The only thing showing he’s alive is a couple of press releases and candidate information on the Ipswich Lib Democrats page.

The problem with saying that “once we meet” Mark Dyson is that it’s so very hard to meet him. With Ben Gummer the challenge is NOT meeting the blighter.

EDIT: I thought I’d give Mark Dyson a chance to tell us what he’d do for Bridge, so I’ve got an interview with him tomorrow.