As ever, answering the question becomes much more difficult because of the childish way politics is discussed in this country. We have all these silly “throwing a lifeline”, “jumping into bed” and so on comments which dramatise it but trivialise it.

The reality is that quite subtle differences in the electoral outcome will change what is the best option, and whatever we do really would depend to a large extent on the other parties.

Michael Meadowcroft gives a counter-argument in a letter in today’s Guardian, but though I take his point I tend to feel being a junior coalition partner is not a happy position, and it is not one we should accept lightly. I’ve seen what it means in local government – you get all the blame if things go wrong and none of the credit if they go right. It does not seem to have helped small continental liberal parties – being a regular junior coalition partner means they tend to lose identity and become just a vehicle for a few top people in the party to have comfy jobs. Perhaps the biggest issue, however, is that if we accept being a junior coalition partner we are likely to be accepting the reduced weight in that coalition caused by our electoral system. Having a quarter of the number of MPs to the senior partner is not going to give us the influence that having two-thirds of the number of MPs of theirs would, and if the national vote is such that a proportional system should give that balance we may have to say that we can’t accept a deal where we feel we don’t have the weight we should have.

So, the “don’t vote down a minority government of the largest party” is a reasonable option, we should talk about it as a possibility, even a strong possibility, but not absolutely commit to it.

I think we should also be pushing strongly the “them v. us” line, where we emphasise the closeness of the Conservative and Labour parties, and suggest this means the natural outcome, should there not be a Liberal Democrat majority in the House, is a Conservative-Labour coalition. It seems to me to be right, because Tony Blair pushed the Labour Party so far into being just a moderate version of the Conservative Party. The mess this country is in now comes about because of that – the Blair-Brown governments continued with the policy for our country that was laid down by Thatcher and carried on by Major, one which involved an over-emphasis on the finance industry, a belief that real wealth was being created by people selling houses to each other, and a belief in some mystical “private sector know-how” which meant that services were best run by private companies (even if they were bought up by state-owned companies but not the UK state), and if that was not possible should incorporate private sector practices, such as boss-knows-best and rule-employees-by-fear. Now if our line could be that the electorate could either keep Britain the same by voting Labour/Conservative, or change it by voting Liberal Democrat, I think that could go down well.