Liberal Democrats smash expectations in Oldham East and Saddleworth

If you'd listened to the media in recent weeks, you'd have thought that the Liberal Democrats were in for a real routing in Oldham, barely reaching double figures. Conventional wisdom said that meltdown was inevitable, and our defeat would be followed by a challenge to Nick Clegg and ultimately the coalition would fall.

Well, what a load of nonsense those predictions turned out to be. The result last night had us with a slightly higher proportion of the vote than we had in May, but unfortunately that wasn't enough to see Elwyn Watkins elected MP.

The result in full was:

• Labour: 14,718 (42.1%)
• Lib Dems: 11,160 (31.9%)
• Conservatives: 4,481 (12.8%)
• UKIP: 2,029 (5.8%)
• BNP: 1,560 (4.5%)
• Green Party: 530 (1.5%)
• Monster Raving Loony Party: 145 (0.4%)
• English Democrats: 144 (0.4%)
• Pirate Party: 96 (0.2%)
• Bus Pass Elvis Party: 67 (0.1%)

Labour haven't got much to shout about - they held their own seat at a time when they're opposing a Government which is having to do some fairly harsh things, after all the tuition fees stuff and the VAT increase. Even then, their new MP was elected on less than half the vote, and less than the combined total of the Coalition parties. They will be very worried indeed at the extent of the tactical voting against them which took place where they were in a position of strength.

The Tories were always likely to get squeezed. It doesn't always happen to the third party - for example, the story of the night 5 years ago in Livingston was that our 3rd place vote pretty much held up for candidate Charles Dundas - but on this occasion, they were. I suspect they'll consider the result pretty much as expected.

The Liberal Democrat result confounded the pundits who had sagely warned of our demise. It seems that the picture is a lot less bleak than political journalists paint it. Who would have predicted that our share of the vote would have increased, albeit by a tiny amount, from May? I do feel really heartbroken for Elwyn and his energetic team who couldn't have put any more effort into it and I really wanted him to win, but they can be very proud of what they achieved against a narrative which said we were stuffed.  I do wonder, though, whether we were a bit too cautious in calling the election so quickly. If the result had been really bad, it could have been blamed on a brief campaign in the harshest of Winters. All the signs were that we were the ones with the momentum. I think in another week or two, we might have pulled it off. We'll never know - and you can't blame the powers that be for being risk averse - but in future, let's see them reach high rather than try to limit damage. The time for timidity is over.

The Oldham result tells us is that we can afford to be more ambitious, and more upbeat. All the reports I hear on the ground suggest that our vote is holding up well. There's probably nobody whose knocked on more doors in Scotland than Alex Cole-Hamilton, Liberal Democrat candidate in Edinburgh Central. He's been bold and upbeat right since his selection in July and it's paying dividends as his team recruits loads of enthusiastic activists.  He and his team have been out there in the most freezing of temperatures, no matter how much snow and ice has been around. They are finding that their intensive effort is paying dividends already. Hopefully in May, he'll be in Holyrood as MSP.

One final thing - I wish the BNP had come last. I'd much rather have seen the Bus Pass Elvis Party beat them. At least they hate filled racists lost their deposits in an election where there was a danger their vote could have increased. It just goes to show that a hard fought campaign, which properly engages with people, can push them down.

Daring to whisper the D word as I see reports from Oldham East and Saddlworth

The Liberal Democrats' chances of winning tomorrow's Oldham East and Saddleworth by-election were long ago written off by the media. Only thing is, somebody seems to have forgotten to tell local people.

I've seen enough reports, most recently from Andrew and Paul's been there too. The polls show that there's everything to play for.

Team Scotland has been out in force in Oldham over the last few days. My Facebook feed is filled with pictures of a buzzing HQ full of activists. I hear of us winning the poster war by some margin. I hear upbeat reports of a very warm and friendly reception on the doorsteps. I also have the experience of having spoken to enough voters by phone to see this for myself. I was actually shocked at how positive they were. I'd read the polls, you see, and I wasn't expecting to have virtually every single person tell me they were voting, or already had by post, for Liberal Democrat Elwyn Watkins.

I've seen many elections before which are very different to how they are reported in the media. My mind wanders back to almost exactly five years ago - in fact, I think it is exactly five years since we moved into our campaign HQ. There was absolutely no way, according to the press, that we had any chance of winning. The fight was between SNP and Labour and we had a nerve even thinking we had a chance, especially when we didn't have a leader and it seemed as though every half hour a new tabloid scandal engulfed one of our MPs. It was not the best national stage on which to fight a by-election, particularly one which had been caused by the untimely death of a well-liked and respected Labour MP.

Nobody, and I mean absolutely nobody outside our own campaign HQ expected us to win. The weekend before the election a procession of journalists were guided round our offices to see the scale of our operation for themselves, but still nobody expected us to pull off a victory to the extent that the BBC's graphic for the first couple of news bulletins after the result showed the constituency coloured in red.

Seasoned campaigners, though, who have a nose for which way things are going, started to dare to think we could actually do it. After a very busy polling day, that I was sitting in the petrol station at Duloch Park in Dunfermline, when I took a phone call from an ecstatic friend who said we'd done it!

The moral of the story is that what's happening on the ground may not always fit with the narrative the media is trying to shape. I think that there's a similar thing going on in Oldham where people are utterly sick of the Labour Party. They have been lied to by the previous Labour MP, who tried to stir up racial tension in order to snatch victory for himself and his party, something neither Ed Miliband nor the current candidate have apologised for. They know fine that Labour's record in Government is nothing to be proud of, leaving the country with a huge economic mess, of ruining our international reputation by taking us into an illegal war in Iraq, making the gap between rich and poor even wider. They like Elwyn Watkins, they know that he'll fight hard for the area and they like the contribution that the Liberal Democrats are making in Government.

I'm not going to make any predictions about what's going to happen tomorrow, but I am sure that the final chapter of this story, unlike the mainstream media suggest, has not yet been written. Oldham East and Saddleworth may have more than beautiful scenery in common with Dunfermline and West Fife.