Chris Dakers hosted his annual summer lunch at the family’s beautiful 17th century house in Brentford today. With the LibDems down at 15% in the latest opinion poll, in The Observer, and Ming Campbell’s personal rating as putative Prime Minister well below that, one might have thought that the mood among local party members and supporters would be downcast (like the weather), but not a bit of it. This is largely because no-one really believes Gordon Brown is just going to swan into No 10 to a chorus of Hallelujahs. Talk of a ‘honeymoon’ is premature, to put it mildly. He was the man who underwrote the Blair years — including the Iraq War — with our tax money, and the idea of him being any less authoritarian on civil liberties issues fails to convince me.
But there were other reasons for the spring in the step of Hounslow LibDems, who recently adopted their prospective parliamentary candidates: Munira Hassam in Feltham and Heston, and Andrew Dakers (Chris’s son) in Brentford and Isleworth. Andrew has been making his mark as a Councillor and an environmental campaigner and is very active in the campaign to regenerate Brentford High Street. Hounslow has tended to be the Cinderella LibDem-wise in South West London, overshadowed by the golden glow of Richmond and Kingston. But as the local team braces itself to put out a constituency-wide tabloid in Brentford and Isleworth, the mood is distinctly up-beat.
