IN SOMERSET we never forget the Liberal Democrats. Most of the comment on David Cameron’s selection as Leader of the Opposition has concentrated either on his impact on the Conservatives themselves, or on Labour. The impact on the Liberal Democrats has been largely overlooked. Yet it could be decisive at the next election.

David Cameron is a liberal Conservative, in a way that the past three leaders of his party were not. Michael Howard came from a right-wing Conservative tradition. His public image was that of the authoritarian Home Secretary he had been in the Major administration. William Hague has more liberal elements in his political character, but he comes from the outspoken Yorkshire tradition, in which every spade has to be called a bloody shovel. Iain Duncan Smith was a Maastricht rebel, itself a respectable liberal cause; yet he had been firmly labelled as right-wing. David Cameron is a genuine liberal Conservative, both in his policies and in his personality.

This has changed the balance between the Conservative and Lib Dem parties and between the Left and the Right inside the Lib Dems. In the complete county of Somerset, the Conservatives and Lib Dems were almost evenly balanced in 2005, in votes and in seats. The Conservatives had 185,000 votes and four seats; the Lib Dems had 170,000 votes and four seats; Labour had 87,000 votes and one seat. Put Cameron into the equation and that balance could shift in favour of the Conservatives.

The safest Somerset seat for any party was Yeovil, where the conservative-minded Lib Dem, David Laws, had a 17.2 per cent majority. Most of the rest of the Somerset seats are marginals of one sort or another. Yeovil showed that Somerset voters respond well to conservative Liberals.

There are few obvious social or economic differences in Somerset between Conservative and Lib Dem voters. The one Labour seat, Wansdyke, does still gain left-wing support from the traditions of the North Somerset coalfield, but the Lib Dem vote is not very different in character from the Conservative vote. Many Somerset families have members who vote for different parties.

David Cameron will fight a liberal Conservative campaign at the next general election. Those were the policies he developed with his friends in the last Parliament; they have many hours of discussion and teamwork behind them. They are what his political generation believes.

Mr Cameron campaigned on the contemporary issues for the leadership and won by 2-1. He has now opened his campaign as Leader of the Opposition with liberal ideas, his support for Labour’s White Paper on Education, his emphasis on the environment, his support for women candidates. All these policies run with the grain of liberal voters. They go down well in Somerset.

Certainly these liberal Conservative policies will not now be reversed. The Conservatives are not going to go back, as they did in the 2001 and 2005 elections, to reliance on more negative themes. The Lib Dems have to face a moderate, optimistic, liberal Conservative, modern campaign. What room will there be for the Lib Dems if David Cameron is the dominant spokesman for liberal values in 2009? Obviously the Conservatives would now prefer Charles Kennedy to remain as the leader of the Lib Dems. He has said that he would in no circumstances co-operate with the Conservatives in a hung Parliament. He is a Lib-Lab politician, and not a particularly effective one. The polls suggest that Cameron is already a more attractive liberal leader than Kennedy, less than a week after becoming Leader of the Opposition.

It would in any case be difficult for the Lib Dems to find a new leader. They should no doubt have chosen Menzies Campbell in 1999. He would have been a natural winner in Somerset, as he is in Fife. But they thought, mistakenly, he would be too old to go up against Tony Blair. I expect he would now be stronger than Kennedy, but the fact that he is being billed as a possible “caretaker” leader is not flattering to him; a caretaker is not what is needed. David Cameron himself is no caretaker; he looks much more like a winner.

The problem for the Lib Dems is that they are completely split between those who want to fight Labour from the left and those who want to fight the Conservatives from the centre. They might indeed choose a caretaker to defend their Conservative inclining seats against David Cameron, but they would not be able to achieve even that without a row in the party. They could end up with a left-wing leader, such as Simon Hughes, who might win votes in Newcastle but would lose seats in the West of England.

The Conservatives will also hope that David Cameron’s campaign will reverse the Lib Dem tactical voting that has helped Labour so much in the past three elections. At the next election many Lib Dems may want to turn Labour out, particularly if Gordon Brown becomes the Labour leader; he does not look like a liberal nor does he talk like one.

Liberal sympathisers in Labour marginals will face a choice between the liberal Conservatism of David Cameron or the Labour authoritarianism of Gordon Brown. Protest votes against the Tories were a 1997 phenomenon; protest votes against 12 years of Labour government will have taken their place.

Liberal Conservatism is a great tradition in itself. It includes many of the greatest Conservative Prime Ministers, including Winston Churchill and many who never became Prime Minister, including in the postwar period Rab Butler and Iain Macleod. It is the underlying political faith of many British people; in Somerset, an easygoing county with deep historic roots, it is close to being our common culture. Already the polls are showing the best response for the Tories in 13 years.

At the next election David Cameron will have to win both Labour and Lib Dem votes. However, Labour is in long-term decline, and for conservative Liberals David Cameron offers a liberal Conservative leadership with a real chance of power.

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