VETERAN politician Shirley Williams says Friday’s result will once and for all “bury the myth” of the Liberal Democrats’ demise.

She said most were sure to keep their seats on Friday because of their “impressive record” – including Duncan Hames in Chippenham.

Baroness Williams, a former Leader of the Liberal Democrats in the House of Lords, visited Chippenham today to meet with student union representatives at Wiltshire College.

She was one of the founders in 1981 of the Social Democratic Party, which merged with the Liberal Party in 1988 to form the Liberal Democrats.

And the former Secretary of State for Education, from 1976 to 1979, described the BTEC qualification as her “baby”, and was pleased when the students told her that BTECs allowed them to better show off their skill set.

Despite her 84 years she shows no signs of slowing down, having championed her party in 40 different seats in the past few months, fitting in Chippenham between Berwick-upon-Tweed on yesterday and Wales tomorrow.

Baroness Williams was confident the Lib Dems would do better than the polls suggested, predicting they would hold 30 to 35 of the 650 seats. At the end of the 2010-2015 Parliament they had 56. She is basing her judgement on her tour as well as on the polls that ask what candidates, rather than what parties, people will vote for.

She said: “A lot of the press predictions that we’ll be wiped out will prove to be dotty, it just isn’t true. And the reason is, Lib Dems tend to be extremely hard-working MPs - and Duncan is an example. Because they really get dug into the local demands, they actually have a better ‘incumbency factor’ and are more likely to be re-elected.

“Seat after seat that I go to, what you see is a great real respect for the local MP because of their impressive record, like Duncan bringing this new college here.”

She scoffed at claims that the Lib Dems were now ‘irrelevant’. She said: “Clearly not. To put it bluntly we are the only people that both Conservatives and Labour feel they could work with, there isn’t another.

“Imagine labour working with UKIP, or the conservatives working with Scottish Nationalists, it’s just unthinkable.

“Although they may not love us, they will all feel they could work with us, because we are a rational party.

“I’m not going to say we won’t lose some seats, we probably will. I also think we may even gain a couple.

“But on Friday we will bury completely the myth that we were going to be wiped out, which was a dream for some extreme persons but it wasn’t more than that.”

She said forming a coalition with the Conservatives had been the right thing to do, and something for which the UK should be very thankful for.

She said: “A couple of weeks ago I was having dinner with an acquaintance, one of the most senior financial regulators and he told me how he suddenly got a phone call at 3am, and he was told, Royal Bank of Scotland will be unable to pay its depositors off in five hours time. It was that close to the edge of the cliff.

“And although I’m no Conservative and never likely to be, somebody had to step in to produce a stable government. If we hadn’t done that I think we would have seen the sort of collapse as you’ve seen in Greece or Spain. Our debts were as great as theirs, but we’ve had the great advantage of a stable government, which enabled the country to get out the other end of the tunnel.

“Actually the country owes us a great deal, though it doesn’t know it.”