Lord Bonkers' Diary: "There’s another part of me that flipping well wants to hold my seat"

Having given Nick Clegg one barrel on Thursday, the old boy gives Tim Farron the other one today. Sometimes I think he will not be satisfied until he is leader himself.

Anyway, this entry completes are week with Lord Bonkers.

Sunday

Were you in the hall for Tim Farron’s speech in the Europe debate at our Conference in Bournemouth? To the best of my recollection, it went like this:

“The day I took over as leader, one journalist predicted confidently that ‘the party that began with Gladstone will now end with Farron’. I resolved that we were going to survive, grow and win again. The Liberal movement of Gladstone, Lloyd George and Jo Grimond was not going to die on my watch.”

“It’s the movement of Paddy Ashplant too,” I observed to my neighbour, “and Farron got that bit out of his memoirs.”

“And I did it. Me! Little Tim from Preston. There’s part of me that says if I never see another referendum in my life that will be too soon. But there’s another part of me that flipping well wants to hold my seat. I’ve got four kids. I’m a bit of a Eurosceptic. We lived in a shoebox but because I had great parents I didn’t realise it was a shoebox until I was older. Have you been to St Asquith’s and seen the space those pews take up? They should rip them out and then we could all sing “Shine Jesus…”.

At that point I left the hall.

Lord Bonkers was Liberal MP for Rutland South West, 1906-10.

Previously in Lord Bonkers' Diary

• The Hinge and Bracket of English pace bowling
• Confessions of a Cabinet Minister
• Some silly ass with a hyphen
• "Just the sort of tomfool idea I would expect"
• I would only have spent it on drink
• The more hot-headed young badgers