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Campaign analysis: Tuesday April 26
Daniel Forman's daily diary of the election campaign.
Tuesday April 26, 10:45am
"Brian who?" will be the response of most voters to the news that former Hackney MP Brian Sedgemore has announced he is defecting from Labour to the Lib Dems.
But these announcements do have the effect of grabbing media attention for a day, which means that Charles Kennedy will keep the spotlight on his strongpoint of Iraq for another day, overshadowing Labour's education policies.
Sedgemore's switch is symbolic more than anything else, representing the fact that the Lib Dems are closer on many key issues - Iraq, ID cards, control orders, tax, tuition fees, etc - to those on Labour's left than the government is itself.
Yet as the explicit aim is to persuade these people to follow him into support for the third party at the polling booths, it may backfire. As many if not more Labour loyalists could be annoyed enough by the politically motivated timing of the move as convinced it is the right call.
It also highlights the contradiction Kennedy is trying to straddle of trying to appeal to the disillusioned on the left and right. Sedgemore - a serial Labour rebel - has little in common with Conservatives.
However defections are now almost part and parcel of campaigns. On a smaller scale the Lib Dems have already pulled this trick once in this election.
Stephen Wilkinson, formerly Labour's candidate for Ribble Valley, announced on the day the poll was called that he was joining Kennedy's ranks.
Labour is far from averse from the tactic either. Wilkinson's move was rather cancelled out by the bizarre decision the next day of Paul Marsden, MP for Shrewsbury in the last parliament, to rejoin Labour having originally quit for the Lib Dems in 2001.
In January it was also announced that retiring Tory MP Robert Jackson was joining Tony Blair's team.
Like its capture of other one nation Conservatives under Blair, such as Shaun Woodward and Alan Howarth, this had a little more impact in that it showed the Tories were no longer representing this group.
Jackson, a respected authority on higher education, also undermined Michael Howard's stance on that subject.
In contrast, no voter is under the illusion that Blair is a representative of the socialist left. Neither will what personal standing Sedgemore has in Hackney South be enough to do more than dent Labour's 15,049 majority in the seat.
Woodward and Howarth did stand again, albeit in safe seats they were parachuted into.
But none of these defections - or 'betrayals' as critics would have them - have the same impact of heavyweight upheavals such as the 'gang of four' leaving Labour to form the SDP.
The saying that today's news is tomorrow's fish and chip paper is redundant only in the sense that takeaways are no longer wrapped in newspaper.
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