There is only one thing worse than beng widely reviled...

I am giving a talk next week and wanted the correct version of a passage from the Britain in Pictures volume on the Liberal Party that I have heard David Grace - aka Disgruntled Radical - recite more than once. 

I emailed him and he kindly sent me a link to the whole book online: The Liberal Party by R.J. Cruikshank.

The passage I wanted comes at the very beginning of the book:

People on the whole are very civil and obliging to Liberals nowadays - at least in public. How times have changed! When this writer was a small boy in the days of the last Liberal Government, quite nice, rosy Conservatives threatened to hang Ministers on lamp-posts, and there were Shelleyan Socialists who promised that at the coming revolution their first tumbril would be reserved, not for Tories, but for Liberals.

In those days, Lloyd George used to tell a story of a man who saved a stranger from drowning at risk to his own life. Presented with a medal by the Mayor, the hero said diffidently, "I did only what any other Englishman would have done in my place. I first turned him over to make sure he wasn't Lloyd George, then I dragged him out of the water."

The moral is that you cannot be in government without making yourself unpopular with an awful lot of people. So perhaps we should have been better prepared for what it would be like to be in government.

David, incidentally, has quoted a passage from this book that points a different moral.