Instead of ridiculing the Lib Dems - which I've been as guilty of as anyone in recent days - let's actually examine their strategy. What is it and what does Swinson want?
Just as Labour's via media on Brexit has been conditioned by the need to win Tory marginals, so the Lib Dem strategy is more or less entirely conditioned by their own fight with the Tories in many areas across southern England.
People who voted Tory under Cameron, then felt politically homeless under May will, so Swinson calculates, vote Lib Dem now. She's probably correct in that.
So what she's trying to do is create some new fangled Conservative Party: for soft/liberal pro-European, internationalist Tories. There's a long, long tradition of those: think Ken Clarke, Douglas Hurd, Geoffrey Howe, John Major, Chris Patten, and very many others.
We forget this now because the Tories have hurtled so incredibly far to the right. But as Clarke put it in the Commons when Article 50 was triggered, "I am merely propounding official Conservative Party policy for 40 years until 23 June 2016".
If Swinson was an effective, good faith campaigner, then instead of obsessing with Corbyn, she'd be highlighting day after day how incredibly extreme the Conservatives now are. Not just on Brexit, but on scores of other issues, domestic and international.
But "yes, I'd push the button"? That's to attract Tory voters. Look at the makeup of her party now. Look at how many former Tory MPs have joined it. This isn't a party of the centre. It's a party of the centre-right - with next to nothing in common with the left.
I can't consider a party of the centre-right progressive in any way. What has she said about austerity or the desperate need for investment? Nothing. Everything is about attracting Tories.
A lot of people castigated New Labour as Tory lite. I get where they're coming from, but disagree. I thought Blair was a liberal - albeit with occasional authoritarian tendencies. Swinson's Liberal Democrats really *are* Tory lite. And in the 1990s, they'd have been true blue.
The difficulty for Labour, though, lies in our absurd, not fit for purpose electoral system. In places where the Lib Dems are better positioned to unseat the Tories, campaigning hard against them is likely to deliver... a Tory MP.
Labour need to focus on places where we're the main challengers to the Tories (places, sadly, where the Lib Dems are behaving like kamikaze pilots: places like Canterbury). It's a very difficult balance to strike.
They're MILES to the right of us. They have no answers and no solutions. They're led by a former friend of fracking FFS. But we still need to be careful. Ultimately, it's about getting the Tories out and being smart in the process.
Now - in a hung Parliament, would Swinson actually do a deal with Johnson? My judgement is 'no'. All those ex-Tories who've joined the Lib Dems have done so because they despise Johnson and Cummings and everything about the direction of their former party.
I don't think the LDs would offer confidence and supply either. I just think they'd refuse to support either Johnson or Corbyn. Meaning more chaos and more Parliamentary paralysis.
Which is, of course, where the SNP come in. They're Labour's potential saviours here. It'd depend on the numbers of course - but we're natural allies in such circumstances.
If the media keep focusing on Swinson, they might forget to focus on a Labour/SNP arrangement. Or at least, not in the way they did in 2015. In many ways, it's too close and too unpredictable for such messages to cut through - especially as so many Tory voters have been alienated
Those liberal Tories panicked and returned Cameron in 2015. This time round, they're awfully likely to go Lib Dem. Which may be good for us, or bad for us; it's too unpredictable to tell. But regardless, we need to remember who the real enemy are here: this rotten Tory government
