Lib Dems aiming for the centre to balance politics

When the Deputy Prime Minister took to the bowling alley in Colchester early in this election campaign with dozens of media cameras trained on him, he knew his aim was under close scrutiny.

But then Nick Clegg and the Liberal Democrats are used to identifying a target and then aiming to hit it. It's how they win most their seats by slowly building local support in a single constituency. If that process works they sometimes make a breakthrough in the whole area, for instance, South West England.

The party has long promised that the East of England could be a breakthrough area but that has yet to materialise. But there has been steady progress with the Lib Dems gaining an additional parliamentary seat in this region at each General Election since 1997.

The Lib Dem first won Colchester, a newly re-created single constituency in 1997. Then came North Norfolk in 2001, which Health Minister Norman Lamb won on his third dogged attempt, carefully whittling away a large Conservative majority.

Cambridge, with its huge student population, followed at the 2005 election and five years ago it was the turn of Norwich South to go Liberal Democrat. Former teacher Simon Wright created an election night shock by ousting the former Labour Home Secretary Charles Clarke.

Mr Wright, now Nick Clegg's Parliamentary Private Secretary, won by just 310 votes so has a titanic struggle to retain the seat in the face of strong opposition from both Labour and the Green Party.

Veteran political campaign Baroness Shirley Williams has been out on the campaign trail for the Lib Dems in both Norwich and Cambridge.

Now aged 84, Baroness Williams first stood as an MP in the 1954 Harwich by-election in Essex. She served as a Labour MP in Hertfordshire from 1964 until 1979 before leaving the party to form the SDP in 1981.

The central plank of the Liberal Democrats' campaign is the party's claim they are the balancing force between the extremes of left or right in British politics.

The Liberal Democrats face an uphill task in the Anglia region in this election. Five years ago they won four seats in the Anglia region, twice as many as Labour.

The party raised their vote by two percentage points and took a 23% share in this region in 2010 ahead of Labour on 20%.

But since forming the coalition government, the party has faced steady decline in the Anglia region. They have lost local councillors at every local election since 2010. The party has lost a third of its council seats in this region in the past four years or nearly 200 councillors.

The region's only Lib Dem Euro MP Andrew Duff lost his seat last year as the party came fifth in the European Election in the East of England behind the Greens.

The Liberal Democrats say opinion polling in their key marginal seats points to their support holding up against national trends.

The party says that with a hung parliament on the cards, it is the Lib Dems who will prevent the Tories lurching off to the right with UKIP, or Labour veering left with the SNP.

Back at the bowling alley in Colchester, Nick Clegg failed to hit the target on every occasion but he did knock some of the skittles down.