With the General Election called on Tuesday April 5th MP Vincent Cable gave his reaction

12.00.00am UTC (GMT +0000) Fri 8th Apr 2005

"After the long 'phoney war' I look forward to getting on with the campaign".

"I think it is generally recognised that I have worked hard for the area in my eight years as an MP and look forward to the privilege of continuing to represent the people of Twickenham".

"Since the 2001 election, when I had a majority of 7655 over the Conservatives, there have been two favourable developments from my point of view: first, a lot of Labour voters who used to vote Lib Dem tactically to defeat the Conservatives will now do so positively because of our stand on the war and other issues".

"And three years of a Conservative council have given us a foretaste of what the Tories are really about: a massive £500 per household increase in council tax without any improvement in services. I have been a little surprised by the weakness of the official, local Conservative campaign - with the evidence of a bitter split leading to a strong, local, UKIP candidate. They have so far only come up with two local campaigns. One is to claim credit for a publicans code of conduct to curb 'binge drinking'; in fact I negotiated it. A second is the claim that I have some kind of secret plan to sell off playing fields: an utter and complete fabrication designed to disguise their own embarrassment about attempted sales of open space by the Conservative council a couple of years ago".