Dump Nick Clegg or face disaster at the polls, senior Lib Dem warns party

A SENIOR Liberal Democrat has suggested the party needs to dump its leader Nick Clegg if it wants to avoid electoral disaster in 2015.

A SENIOR Liberal Democrat has suggested the party needs to dump its leader Nick Clegg if it wants to avoid electoral disaster in 2015.

With just a few weeks before the Lib Dems gather in Brighton for their party conference, Lord Oakeshott, a former party Treasury spokesman, said that there was a need to examine “strategy and management”.

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He claimed that 39 of the party’s 57 MPs could be lost at the next election if changes were not made at the top.

Lord Oakeshott said: “We have lost over half our market share, if you like to put it that way if we had been Sainsbury’s, since the election and any business that had done that would be looking very hard now at both its strategy and its management to see how we get some of that back because otherwise we are going to lose a large number of seats at the next election.”

Lord Oakeshott said elections were “not just about the message, they are also about the messenger” and called for the party to analyse how it could maximise its votes next time.

Describing Mr Clegg’s decision to take the party into government with the Conservatives as “brave”, he said Lib Dem grassroots were not against coalition but found working with the Tories “difficult”.

He added: “If you were Sainsbury’s you would look both at what happened to the brand and why. We have a very good brand and very good policies which are popular, but on things like the banks, sorting them out, like taxing the wealthy we have to fight very hard not just to put the message across but to get it implemented in government.”

The intervention comes after a difficult summer for the Deputy Prime Minister who has seen his plans to bring elections to the House of Lords thwarted by Tory rebels and Labour.

The fallout saw his relations with Tory Prime Minister David Cameron strained further when he pulled out of the agreement to back changes to constituency boundaries.

This week Mr Clegg publicly fell out with the Chancellor George Osborne over his calls for a new 0.5 per cent levy on assets to make the rich help pay for the economic recovery. The move was dismissed as the “politics of envy” by senior Tories.

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Lord Oakeshott had previously called for his friend Vince Cable to be made Chancellor and his intervention is damaging for Mr Clegg who is already facing dissatisfaction among party members who feel that their loss of support in the country has not been matched by achievements in the coalition.

Activists have already vented their anger over a decision to treble tuition fees to up to £9,000 and reforms to the NHS which have allowed more to be done by the private sector.

But despite winning a key concession to accelerate the increase of the threshold to £10,000 where people start paying income tax, there have been concerns that the leadership backed a 5p cut for the richest earning £150,000 a year to 45p.

At the last local elections the Lib Dems had their worst result since the 1980s losing 357 seats.

Opinion polls have been uncomfortable reading for Lib Dems, with the party hovering around the 11 per cent mark, while Mr Clegg’s popularity has lagged behind that of Mr Cameron and Labour’s Ed Miliband.