Emily Thornberry and the Taliban: It's all my fault

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The Daily Mirror tells us that

Jo Swinson has hit back at Labour's Emily Thornberry after she branded the Lib Dems 'kind of Taliban' over their Brexit policy.

And the Liberal Democrats have been united in their outrage.

Trouble is, I have had a nagging feeling all day that it may be my fault.

Because this is how I began my Lib Dem Conference diary for the Guardian website back in 2001:

Fierce, bearded and wedded to an impenetrable ideology. Not a description of the Taliban, but the average commentator's view of the Liberal Democrats.

Clearly, I am the one who put the idea into what we may loosely call Thornberry's mind.

Searching this blog I find that Rory Stewart - AKA Lawrence of Belgravia - made the same comparison in 2010 in the course of a Westminster lecture.