POLITICS and football! Both are highly competitive, both involve winners and losers, both result in some people getting highly emotional and less rational than they should.

Of course there are differences. When the final whistle blows it's the end. When the votes are announced it's just the beginning, at least for the winners. And football seems to get a lot more people waving their banners!

But the ups and downs are the same. My party had some great victories in this area last week. As we went home from two election counts in four days I remembered all times when we lost.

On Wednesday, as both David Waddington and I spoke in a House of Lords debate on local and regional government, I remembered two general elections in 1974. The three candidates in the old Nelson and Colne seat were David who had won the epic 1968 by-election for the Tories, Doug Hoyle for Labour and myself for the Liberals.

In the February election, David hung on by a whisker, only to lose to Doug in October when my vote was mercilessly squeezed.

Now, three decades later, the three of us all sit in the House of Lords - I think that may be a record of a kind!

Last week Lord Waddington and I found ourselves on the same side against the government's costly plans to tear apart our local councils as a condition of setting up a feeble and in my view rather useless regional assembly.

Those elections 30 years ago were difficult ones for Liberals but I knew then that such contests belong to the losers as well as the winners.

Football teams can only win the cup or the European championship if everyone else loses. So it is in politics. You win some, you lose some.

I tell my Liberal Democrat colleagues this as they celebrate gains in Burnley and control of Pendle, and "winning" Pendle in the European election and coming second in Burnley.

Those of us who win must never forget that we are mere tenants of our seats.