I was the leader of the Liberal Democrats and at the 1997 election we won 46 seats which was our best performance since the 1920s and it was all down to a strategy of not really having an opinion on anything and staying firmly somewhere between the other two parties. When the left wing Labour and the right wing Conservatives argued over something, i put us in the middle so we were netheir left nor right and it worked, people obviously liked me being neither one thing or the other but somewhere in between.
It may have been a successful political strategy but it didn't work quite so well when i was accused of an affair with my secretary, my defence that i neither touched her left leg nor her right leg but somewhere inbetween... well, you may see the fault in my argument there.
I did have an image of being a bit smug and boring so when the affair earned me the tabloid nickname of 'Paddy Pantsdown', it did my image and career no harm especially as the Liberal Democrats standing in the polls went up and they had looked around and saw that my only viable replacement was an alcoholic Scotsman so decided to stick with me after all.
Apart from that, us Lib Dems were not taken that seriously, we had 21% of the vote yet comedians hardly took the piss out of us at all and i often asked why they refused to make us look ridiculous and a laughing stock in front of millions of potential voters, but they just said that we will never be the laughing stock of British politics all the time John Mayor and his shower are in power and they had a point, nothing we did was going to top a Government Cabinet that had Edwina Curry in it.
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