What does the party’s future look like? Test #7 was: what does the votes:seats ratio look like? This ratio shows how good, or not, the party is at bucking the national trend by effective target seat campaigning. This time the ratio was back up to 1.6, an increase from 2015 although still lower than the 1997-2010 era. That it rose at all is a tribute to the target seat campaign which this time – unlike in 2010 – managed to match the concentration by other parties, especially the Conservatives, of national campaign items (such as direct mail which doesn’t name the candidate) in specific target seats. This activity is a result of the broken election expenses regime which tightly restricts campaigning that names candidates but gives in effect unlimited sums to spend on campaigning in target seats which doesn’t name candidates. This puts the Liberal Democrats at a huge disadvantage, so any improvement in being able to buck the national trend in target seats is impressive. There will certainly be lessons to learn, such as over how accurate the party’s tracking was of different seats on polling day. But overall the still relatively new in post Director of Campaigns and Elections, Shaun Roberts, and his team had a good election. We will need more data to come in before being able to properly judge test #8: are there signs of a new core vote for the party forming? Early signs are a tentative yes, however, in that there was significant churn in the party’s vote from 2015 with a shift towards a more pro-European, socially liberal and internationalist base for it, as seen in both national polling and the pattern of constituency results. One area of debate during the election was whether the pool of Remain supporters the Liberal Democrats were fishing in was large enough given that the majority of voters either voted for Brexit or wanted to get on with it. However, the proportion of people who still wanted a political party to argue over Brexit, and from a pro-European position, was – depending on which polling question was used to measure it – between a quarter and a third of the electorate. That was a big enough pool to have supported a significant increase in the Lib Dem vote. The problem wasn’t the size of the pool, it was the party’s ability to capitalise on it. And if the party had capitalised better on it, then that pool could have grown as well. This will be a key area for the party’s election post-mortems. Then there is test #9: how do Tim Farron’s ratings fare by the end of the campaign? There was some progress, with for example on the YouGov figures the percentage saying they have a favourable opinion of him rising from 14% early in the year to 20% late in the campaign. The unfavourable figure, however, also rose – from the mid-thirties to the mid-forties. Similarly, MORI’s figures, which are much more volatile, show progress early in the year but then a fading in the last two months with a final net dissatisfied rating only slightly better than Nick Clegg’s in 2015. More detailed data from the British Election Survey later this year will help pin down the details of the trends and hence the likely causes, in particular the question of how much of an impact there was from the round of interviews which focused on his religious beliefs. I suspect this will turn out to have been a significant factor, both because it deprived the party of momentum and also because it contributed to a very confused picture of the party cutting through to ordinary voters who don’t pay much attention to politics. Focus groups such as those for Britain Thinks show that what voters noticed about the Lib Dems was Tim Farron, legalising cannabis (which received an enormous volume of local and regional media) and Europe. Being in favour of legalising cannabis can be a useful high profile signal of being a modern, socially liberal party. But when contrasted with the questioning over Tim Farron’s religious beliefs, it was more a picture of confusion than of a consistent worldview that came over to voters judging by that focus group evidence. However much many Liberal Democrat activists may be angered by some of the questioning over Tim Farron’s beliefs, it would be foolish to close our collective eyes and hope it won’t ever happen again. Just as we might greatly dislike first past the post but know we need a strategy for the next election which can deal with it, so too Tim Farron and the party will need an approach to the next election that can deal with Andrew Neil or another journalist’s opening question in the first big set piece interview being, “So Mr Farron, now that you’ve had another few months/years [delete according to speed of next election] to think about it, do you think abortion is wrong?” Unfair question perhaps, but also likely. And finally to end on a more positive note with test #10: does the new Parliamentary Party look more or less like the electorate than the current one? In short, yes – one-third female and including both an MP with a disability and one from a minority background, not to mention Tim Farron’s own working class roots. Very much a work in progress, but progress made.