Despite my personal intervention in the Crewe & Nantwich by-election - i.e. spending a day pounding pavements there on Wednesday - I’m afraid the Lib Dems didn’t do as well as we hoped, suffering the classic “third party squeeze” on our vote. Travelling around the constituency it was clear that the Conservatives had won the poster battle, and this was reflected in the votes cast on the day.

A pity - we had an excellent candidate, but it seems that voters were intent on giving Gordon Brown a “kicking”, and had decided that the best way to do this was to vote Tory. By-elections always magnify trends, and this time it didn’t favour us. The next one (Henley), however, may be very different!

I spent most of Thursday over in Harbury, helping Liberal Democrat Bev Mann in her campaign to unseat the Conservative incumbent in the Stratford District Council elections. Bev is fairly new to the Lib Dems, but very well known locally after six years as a parish councillor, and coming from a long-established local family.

The result was incredibly close, but ended up with Bev winning the seat by a margin of 11 votes (861 votes to 850). Perhaps those last few people that I “knock up” at 9 o’clock at night made all the difference!

Anyway, winning is a great feeling, especially as the Lib Dems made a total of five gains from the Tories across Stratford District as a whole. I’m off to the post-election party tonight, which will definitely be quite a celebration!

Last year the Liberal Democrat group on the County Council won all-party support for a motion backing the importance of concessionary travel schemes for young people and urging action at national and local level.

I have been asked to chair an all-party panel of councillors to review this subject in depth, and to report our recommendations back to the Council. The panel held its first meeting yesterday to scope the work and establish our work plan.

An important input to our work will be the voices of young people themselves. Members of the Youth Parliament have already been campaigning on this issues nationally and locally, so we shall certainly want to hear from them, plus as wide a cross-section of other young people’s views as possible.

Well, the County Council has today agreed its budget for 2008/09, but not without a few surprises along the way!

For reasons only known to themselves, the Labour group chose not to release its proposals until 25 minutes before the start of the budget debate! This forced an unnecessary first adjournment to give time to take in the details. However, it was soon clear that Labour did not intend to compromise with anyone, so the rest of the day was spent with the Liberal Democrats and Conservatives hammering out a revised budget that both parties were willing to support - with Labour voting against.

Next year’s council tax increase will be 3.9%, but more importantly the Liberal Democrats succeeded in getting every single one of our budget proposals into the final agreement, albeit with some adjustments to amounts allocated in some cases.

An excellent day for the Lib Dem group, who demonstrated that we know how to play grown-up politics in a “hung council” situation even if Labour don’t!

The Executive of the local Liberal Democrat party (covering the new constituency of Kenilworth & Southam) held its first meeting of 2008 last night. Our prospective parliamentary candidate Nigel Rock was there.

The new constituency is an amalgam of parts of Warwick district, Stratford district and Rugby borough, and is mostly rural. For Kenilworth voters it will mark a big change from the previous Rugby & Kenilworth constituency. Firstly, Kenilworth is now the largest town by some margin. Secondly, the Liberal Democrats are the clear challengers to the Conservatives across the whole constituency - there is not a single Labour councillor in any ward.

More details of the local party and the new constituency can be found on the constituency party’s web site www.kandslibdems.org.uk.