Good. No election. Well, I'll qualify that a little - the relatively short pain of a three week campaign could have seen friend and former council colleague Steve Goddard give Andrew Smith some unwanted leisure time for Christmas, which would have been fantastic - but I'm pleased we won't have to for now.

There may now be three, four, even five more party conferences in which to whip up a storm of revolutionary liberalism to really wow the electorate with a genuine alternative to the "cosy consensus" which, in my opinion anyway, is not evident right now in our policies. Time to give the FPC some breathing space from the poll obsessed campaign strategists to come up with really radical policies and instruct those strategists to sell them, not be hemmed in by what they say they can and cannot sell.

2009 will see the centenary of Lloyd George's "People's Budget" and we can develop a compelling theme in two years around "Liberal Britain: unfinished business" hijacked as the political landscape has been for a century alternately by the socialism and protectionism of Labour and Conservative governments, now merged into one amorphous mass of interfering statism.

That the hysteria of the past few days can be put down to a Tory announcement of a tax shift amounting to not much more than a half of one per cent of the government budget from the super-rich to the merely very rich just proves the paucity of imagination currently pervading both politicians and public. Ming Campbell has been right in suggesting that there's not a fag paper between the two halves of the statist party led by Brown and Cameron, and the past two weeks have seen nothing to disabuse us of that.

The time for radicalism is now. Radical liberalism. We don't merely want the "people to decide" but for the people to be able to take back power over their own lives. The power that once marked us out as British; dynamic, enterprising and freedom loving but which has been subdued, even nearly killed off perhaps through decades of dependency and government managerialism.