IT was the morning after bonfire night when a Lord Ashcroft poll suggested Worcester MP Robin Walker will lose his seat next year - a rocket if ever there was one.

But The Source is wondering just how many recounts will be required to decide the winner in this now increasingly hyped-up, glorified parliamentary contest.

The headline poll from Lord Ashcroft puts Labour on 36 per cent of the vote and the Tories on 34 per cent, but dig underneath those findings.

Of the 1,000 people polled, researchers found 228 certain Labour voters and 204 definite Tories, a difference of just 24.

And no fewer than 231 householders said they'd either not yet made their mind up, or refused to say.

Rather cleverly, Lord Ashcroft's experts decided to manually adjust the voting tally for each party to add in some of those 'don't knows', based on historical evidence which they insist makes polling more accurate.

Yet underneath all this, Ed Miliband's ratings have collapsed to minus 34 per cent, the worst verdict of any PM or opposition leader at this stage since Michael Foot, and we all know how that ended up.

It was 1974 the last time Worcester's parliamentary seat outcome didn't align to the national result, when Robin's late father, Lord Peter Walker, secured victory for the Tories but Labour formed a Government.

Are we about to witness an ironic turning of the tables?

* TALKING of the poll, you may have seen the Liberal Democrats on just five per cent of the vote in Worcester, not quite the point of extinction, but certainly oblivion.

Yet the party is hardly helping itself - we are six months away from the General Election and it still hasn't announced its candidate.

A quick glance at the party's own website reveals this to be a common theme, in fact no Lib Dem candidate is listed under any Worcestershire constituency.

It might be a lost cause, but this rather cack-handed approach can't help.

* WORCESTERSHIRE County Council's people have been onto us this week, saying they were annoyed we didn't stick to calling staff gagging orders 'compromise agreements'.

The way PR works, eh?