However much I love Vince Cable, I can’t let his comments urging people to vote tactically for Labour in the forthcoming Gorton and Denton by-election pass without comment. He told the I Paper:

He pointed out that in previous by-elections and at the last general election, the Lib Dems had benefited from tactical voting by presenting themselves as the main anti-Conservative force in certain areas.

Cable – who was business secretary in the coalition government before leading his party from 2017 to 2019 – said: “First of all, the Lib Dems are not going to win here.

There is a flipside to tactical voting – the Lib Dems have benefited from perfecting organised tactical voting, and there is a reciprocal side of it that when we stand no chance of winning, we have to be honest about what we would do instead.

We do have a duty to get behind the candidate – and the sense I get, we’re all floating in the unknown here, is that whether it’s local surveys or the kind of feedback our people are getting on the ground, is that, for all the problems of the Labour Government they are still strong enough to present the main challenge to Reform and we have got to therefore get behind them.

Where he is right is that we do, of course, encourage tactical voting when we are in a position to win a seat. Squeezing the third, fourth or fifth place candidates’ votes is a legitimate campaign tactic. We need those people to vote for us if we are going to do well.

And I suspect that many Lib Dems vote tactically to stop other parties at the same time as campaigning in target seats to ensure other Lib Dems win. And I’m not going to judge them. However, it’s not for us to pro-actively encourage our supporters to vote a certain way. It’s for the party who wants their vote to persuade them. We might, by the size of our campaign in a particular area not stand in their way but we should always be about encouraging people to vote Lib Dem.

The party spokesperson who responded to Vince’s comments did so with respect, which was good.

Vince Cable has made an invaluable contribution to the party over the years and he is entitled to his own view.

As a party we’ll always make the case for voting Liberal Democrat, and that’s why we’re standing a candidate in Gorton and Denton and fighting for every vote.

For me, though, there are no circumstances in which I could vote Labour at the moment. There is a time when I might have considered voting tactically for them. The closest I ever got was in 2015 to counteract the SNP surge. However, I voted Lib Dem because I didn’t think my Labour MP was worth saving.

Not now, though. Labour are clearly worried about the Scottish Parliament elections because they canvassed me a couple of months ago. I told them that they had disappointed so much on various things, such as the two child payment, Starmer’s “island of strangers” speech and the way they had thrown trans people under the bus that I wouldn’t even give them a preference in a Council election (we have STV up here).

I don’t necessarily have a problem with the idea of voting for another party to stop Reform. Farage’s party is the ultimate nasty party that brings the worst of Trumpian politics to Britain. And we only have to look at innocent protesters being gunned down by barely trained thugs on the streets of Minneapolis, people being ripped from their families and sent to prison in another country without due process, the blatant corruption (Trump has enriched himself by a minimum of $1.4 billion) in the first year of his second term and the dismantling of the international order and democracy itself in the US to know that we don’t want that here.

But Labour’s answer to Reform has been to imitate them, to ape their narrative and paint themselves as a sort of Reform Lite. And the more they do that, the more the Reform narrative on immigrants, on marginalised groups of people, becomes embedded.