Liberal Vision - if it wasn't nailed to its perch, it would be pushing up the daisies...

Three months ago, we all got terribly excited about 'Liberal Vision'. It was all about freedom, removing the dead hand of government from the lives of the people. Not a concept that, in itself, that I was particularly troubled by.

On the other hand, they did feel it necessary to mark our MPs for liberalism - their 'poster boy' promptly calling for a ban on the sale of cheap alcohol by supermarkets - using a set of criteria heavily weighted towards lifestyle-related issues and thus somewhat distorted. They also suggested that most of our MPs would lose their seats unless we pledged tax cuts. As a form of attention seeking, it worked very well, even if such an open display of disloyalty made it difficult to attract public support.

However, they had made an impression, and attracted media interest. Indeed, Mark Littlewood got plenty of air time to perfect his impression of a critical friend of Liberal Democracy. Since then, nothing, nada... not so much a thinktank as an accursed castle, asleep for a hundred years.

Of course, a cynic might suggest that the launch of Liberal Vision was merely a means to gain a platform, and that two rather weak papers were sufficient to fool the mainstream media into giving a 'wannabe' a higher profile than his record merited. Indeed, we've been here before. Ben Ramm, whose almost mythical publication, 'The Liberal', gained him a notoriety arising solely from an uncanny ability to use media opportunities to denigrate the Party.

Liberal Vision's sole asset is Mark Littlewood. He has, regardless of what one might think of his politics, a proven record of attracting coverage. What else might help Liberal Vision to develop a veneer of credibility is yet to become apparent, presuming that it aspires to be anything more than a vehicle for personal vanity...