At the next General Election, voters face a clear choice: deregulation and less interference in everyday life with the Conservatives, or yet more regulation and interference under Mr Blair.

Polling in a general election is pretty accurate, because turnout is usually high.

That special election showed there's some real disenchantment with conservatives in general and in a district that was supposed to be safely Republican.

The general election is not an organizational exercise - it's a mass media exercise.

It does no good to be a conservative if you can't sell a conservative message in a general election.

I showed empirically that in the general election those crossover voters stayed with the candidate they had crossed over to support in the primary. A lot of Republicans preferred her in 1976 and stayed with her.