Parliament may have been in recess this week, MPs have been taking a breather after a

frenetic two months of speculation about Boris Johnson's leadership, but the political

action hasn't stopped. While attention is focused on the unfolding drama in Ukraine, behind

the scenes the Labour Party and the Liberal Democrats have been quietly carving up the map

of the UK political battleground, head of the next general election.

Welcome to Pains politics, Seb's taking a few days off too, so this week it's the equally

elicerative Parker's politics, with me George Parker. Later we'll be looking at the Ukraine

crisis and the way that Johnson's government is handling it, with our top FT team, Gideon

Rackman, who's at a very tense Munich security conference this weekend and Laura Hughes.

First, a very significant story about the next election featuring Labour and the Liberal

Democrats. Not since the days of Paddy Ashtown's ultimately unproductive courtship of Tony

Blair in the 1990s, Blair's massive 1997 majority blew any talk of Lib Labyrinth out of

the water. Have relations between the two opposition parties looked so promising.

The idea of the progressive parties of the centre left working together is nothing new,

of course. This was David Steele, the former Liberal leader, talking about his Lib Lab

packed with James Callahan's Labour government in 1977.

And it is up to us to argue forcibly and convincingly that a liberal holdover government is

both healthy and desirable and that the electorate should seize the opportunity to increase

our influence and representation in Parliament.

And forward to 2021, and last year saw the Labour party take a conscious decision not

to campaign hard in two bi-elections, whether Lib Dems were the main challenges to the Conservatives.

The result was two big wins for the Ed Davies party in former Tory blue wall strongholds,

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