The myth that Labour's tax policies lost them the 1992 election

Why did John Major win the 1992 election when most pundits expected Neil Kinnock's Labour Party to be the victors?

Immediately after the contest, a consensus developed that the reason was the effectiveness of the Conservatives' campaign against Labour's economic policies. This view was certainly advanced by the Tories themselves, as its acceptance would make Labour more timid about challenging Thatcherite economics in future. 

And it was advanced by the head of the Tory campaign, Chris Patten, perhaps as a way of burnishing his reputation and consoling himself after he lost his own seat of Bath to the Liberal Democrats.

But I have always doubted this explanation. I remember thinking that it did not chime with what I had heard during the campaign from voters or from colleagues at work.

I recently came across an article that suggests I was right to be sceptical. In May 1994 the Independent published an article by Anthony Heath, Roger Jowell and John Curtice on the findings of their study of the 1992 election.

They go through the various explanations that had been offered for Labour's defeat and find them all wanting – notably the claim that "It's The Sun Wot Won It" made by, you guessed it, The Sun itself.

Here are Heath et al. on the suggestion that it was Labour's tax policies that had been decisive:

Labour's proposals for taxation and national insurance contributions – outlined in John Smith's 'alternative Budget' – were relentlessly attacked by the Conservatives. Faced with the prospect of a cut in their disposable income, the argument runs, voters had second thoughts about the wisdom of letting Labour in.

But our surveys find little evidence to back this argument. It arose because the polls showed a small Labour lead throughout a campaign in which taxation was one of the dominant issues and yet the Tories won. Our research, however, confirms that the pollsters had it wrong all along: they consistently underestimated the Tory vote. The Conservatives were ahead throughout the campaign. 

There was a late swing, but far too small to account for Labour's defeat. And the people who deserted Labour were not particularly averse to high taxation; rather, they seemed to have relatively little faith in Labour's ability to improve services such as health and education.

In fact, the authors find nothing in the 1992 election campaign had much of an effect on the final outcome.

I did receive intimations that there had been a late swing to the Tories. During the campaign, I'd heard stories of Liberal Democrat workers putting money on Nick Harvey gaining North Devon with a large majority, when ultimately he gained it with a small one. 

And I was told to put money on the Lib Dems in Falmouth and Camborne, because Sebastian Coe was going down very badly there. Luckily I didn't, because Coe held the seat for the Tories. He lost to Labour in 1997 and the Lib Dems finally took it in 2005.

My own theory was that voters had chosen John Major over Neil Kinnock. After Margaret Thatcher's late Sturm und Drang years, Major was a breath of fresh air. Those who only know of him as a figure of fun may be surprised at this, but if they study his statesmanlike conduct since losing power they may see why people found him attractive in 1992.

Neil Kinnock, by contrast, had been leader of the opposition for nine years. Some of the attacks on him as a "Welsh windbag" bordered on the racist, but, boy, he did talk a lot. And, burdened by cares of leadership, he had lost the wit and sparkle that had made his name as a backbench MP – notably on Jimmy Young's Radio 2 programme.

So that's why I didn't believe in 1992 that the Tories' attacks on Labour's tax policies had won them the election. And, going by Heath et al.'s study, I was right not to believe what became the received wisdom on that contest.

This question is not just of historical interest. Rachel Reeves's pledge not to increase income tax, national insurance or VAT, which has backed her into such a corner, was made because of a more or less conscious memory of 1992.

Two Liberal views on Britain and Europe after the election

Bremain in Spain has a page giving the reaction of half a dozen pro-European voices to the result of the general election.

Among them are Nick Harvey:

Yes, we would all have preferred Labour not to be elected with red lines drawn against the customs union, single market or ‘rejoin’ – though experts tell me those would barely have been feasible in the first term anyway.

 But we have seen the new PM totally reset the relationship with Europe at the Blenheim summit, the new Foreign Secretary start talks about an ambitious UK-EU security agreement, and the first King’s Speech signal an enabling bill to allow ‘dynamic alignment’ with evolving EU regulations.

It is a great start.

and Chris Rennard:

Incremental changes in the right direction are already being made. But it will take greater courage and more time for Keir Starmer to use his advocacy skills to explain that aligning ourselves again with our neighbours is in the interests of our own economy. He must also explain that this will be best done by us having a proper say in the rules, requiring membership of the Single Market.  Perhaps a 2029 Manifesto commitment?

Re-joining the EU will probably also require the adoption of Proportional Representation, which has had the support of the Labour Party members in recent years. I doubt if we could be readmitted without ensuring that the U.K. would not adopt a “Hokey Cokey” approach to membership in future. 

There are also reactions from Gina Miller, Anand Menon, Chris Grey and Liz Webster.

This time the Lib Dem leadership kept its discipline during the election campaign

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The Liberal Democrats' targeting strategy was an extraordinary success. I believe Jeremy Hunt's Godalming and Ash was the only seat to evade us.

Those who devised the strategy and communicated the rationale for it to the membership deserve congratulation.

In some quarters there was clearly a worry that the membership would lose discipline and start campaigning in their own constituencies rather than work in the target seats they were asked to.

But the striking contrast with 2019 this time round was that the Lib Dem leadership kept its discipline.

In retrospect - and Michael Mullaney said so on this blog immediately after the election - the change from backing a second referendum to a policy of revoking Brexit was a mistake. But it was approved enthusiastically enough by that autumn's party conference.

That was not true of the decision to allow Boris Johnson the general election he craved, which was described by Nick Harvey as "a catastrophic mistake".

Nor was it true of Jo Swinson's declaration at our campaign launch for the 2019 election that she could be the next prime minister.

And our targeting strategy in 2019? Liberator 397, the September 2019 issue, asked:

Are some people getting carried away by trying to extrapolate the European election results into Westminster terms and then wondering how randomly first-past-the-post might work with four parties in contention?

A briefing to peers indicated a startlingly high number of seats shown as potentially winnable in some scenarios if such trends continued. This has led to some seats suddenly being judged winnable that look, to put it politely, speculative.

These include Battersea (8 per cent), Chipping Barnet (5.4 per cent and a close Tory-Labour marginal too) and even more remarkably Cardiff North (3.3 per cent).

I think the answer to that question was yes.

Five years later it's wonderful how far we have come thanks to a leader with good judgement and a consistent strategy that has been properly communicated to members.

The Joy of Six 1185

Nick Harvey and Paul Tyler talk to Arthur Snell about their book Can Parliament Take Back Control? He says they have "produced a short, easily readable book which contains a set of clear proposals, around elections, parliamentary procedure, reform of the upper house and standards in public life. Although it’s just about parliament, this book could be titled How to Fix Britain, because if its recommendations where followed, our national life would be improved immeasurably." 

Post-Covid transport recovery, supporting the night economy, from-the-ground-up regeneration, harnessing Smart Cities tech. It's all in the Liberal Vision for Urban Britain from Matthew Pennell.

"'Discipline has broken down completely and the party feels ungovernable,' a senior Tory adviser told HuffPost UK. 'The PM has managed to anger pretty much all sides of the party, which is quite the achievement.'" Kevin Schofield on Rishi Sunak's impossible job.

Moheb Costandi argues that while the neurodiversity movement has empowered many people with autism, it favours the high-functioning and overlooks those who struggle with severe autism.

Julian Barnes reviews a book on Monet, but what he has to say about corruption in the world of art criticism is the real eyeopener.

"Egged on by manager Stephen Woolley (who would go on to produce British films such as Mona Lisa and Scandal), its programming exuded arthouse cool, the wired, insurgent energy of post-punk music, and the filthiness of American grindhouse." Sukhdev Sandhu watches a documentary about the Scala cinema, which flourished in King's Cross between 1978 and 1993.

The new issue of Liberator is out

The new issue of Liberator has arrived. It's full of reaction to December's disappointing election campaign - notably Nick Harvey's itemising of the eight errors that campaign made.

And there is Radical Bulletin, the section that sets out to let you know what's really going on in the Liberal Democrats.

This time you will read, among other things, of:

• the analysis that showed the party's campaign was going wrong but was ignored by those running it
• strange goings on in Canterbury
• the final disgrace of the continuing Liberal Party

You can subscribe to Liberator here.

Nick Harvey on Jo Swinson's "catastrophic mistake"

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Nick Harvey, former Liberal Democrat chief executive and for MP for North Devon, has a letter in the new Private Eye.

It concludes:

Though I had departed by then, the Lib Dem pivot on 28 October to back an election appears to have been taken that weekend under SNP pressure, and Labour left Labour no choice but to follow suit.

It was a catastrophic mistake, gift-wrapping everything wanted and handing it to him for Christmas... majority government, Brexit, and given the state of the Labour Party, potentially ten years in office. 

Defeated Lib Dem MPs, Jo Swinson among them, paid a heavy price for her disastrous miscalculation.

Lib Dems call emergency board meeting for Tuesday

PoliticsHome reports a development in the story about redundancies at Lib Dem head office that broke last week:

Lib Dem bosses have been summoned to an emergency board meeting amid a financial crisis in the party that is set to see up to quarter of staff laid off. 

Board members are expecting an “angry” exchange of views at the summit next week, with some blaming the current turmoil on bungled financial management.

The meeting, called by the party's president Sal Brinton, will take place on Tuesday evening.

In an article for Lib Dem Voice last week, Nick Harvey (the party's chief executive and former MP for North Devon) spoke of a "reorganisation" and of politics being a cyclical business where parties consolidate after an election and later build up for the next.

However, sources quoted by PoliticsHome suggest bad financial planning is to blame for the redundancies.

That is in line with the rumours I heard before this story broke.

Six of the Best 810

Nick Harvey introduces the Liberal Democrats' 2017 general election review - or at least the version that has been made public.

"The proposed Lib Dem immigration policy is simply not fit for purpose. I knew this as soon as I saw the consultation questions, which were all on the theme of 'immigration: threat or menace?' and 'how much should we punish immigrants? A lot, or more than that?'" Andrew Hickey tells it like it is.

Martin Sewell asks why there has been no Church of England inquiry into the crimes of John Smyth.

Peter Kinderman presents six 'psychological' terms that psychologists never use.

"Dickens uses the "no-popery" uprising inspired by Lord George Gordon’s inflammatory rhetoric against the Roman Catholic "infiltration" of Britain in the 18th century as a means of attacking mob mentality and the hijacking of political causes for crude personal gain. Recommended reading in Brexit Britain, trust me." Joe Sommerlad praises Barnaby Rudge - and seven other lesser-known novels by well-know authors.

"It’s one of those sad English clerk and wife experience strange mystic growth in the dreary London suburbs-type possibly-fairies affairs." John Holbo has been reading Arthur Machen/s A Fragment of Life.

Have the Liberals been forgiven in Devon for shooting Rinka?

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We have, because Nick Harvey won North Devon back from the Tories in 1992 and held it until the debacle of 2015.

But there were promising signs even before Nick was elected.

I am reminded of one of the first pieces I ever wrote for Liberal Democrat News - a review of the register of MPs' interests, which appeared in the edition of 17 May 1996.

It was all a long time ago: Alex Carlile was still an MP and still a Liberal Democrat.

I wrote of him:

Alex Carlile is another hard-working member, including among his interests membership of the board of the British Field Sports Society and the loan of a fax machine from the Liberal Democrat Country Forum. 

On second thoughts, that may be a misprint for "fox machine" - an experimental robot which Mr Carlile and his friends pursue across the hills of the Welsh Border, enjoying cruelty-free hunting. Let us hope so.

But the point of this post and mention of Rinka lies in the the entry for Emma Nicholson, who was still an MP and still a Liberal Democrat then too:

She supplies a long and immensely impressive list of all the good causes with which she is involved - everything from the Women's Engineering Society to the Child Psychotherapy Trust. 

But she holds one post which stands out even above these. Emma is a vice-patron of the North West Devon Canine Association. 

I don't know about you, but I suspect that some of her recent Liberal predecessors in the region were not invited to serve in this capacity.

Later. Because I was tired last night I left out the main point of this post. That was to congratulate Kirsten Johnson on being selected as the new Lib Dem PPC for North Devon.

Read Nick Harvey's take on the Lib Dems' disaster of 2015

Nick Harvey, the former Liberal Democrat MP for North Devon, was appointed as interim chief executive of the party.

That makes it interesting to revisit an article he wrote for Liberator in November 2015 on the party's collapse at that year's general election.

I quoted a key passage when I blogged about it at the time:

Somehow, though stuck at 8% in national polls, we clung to the idea that incumbency would save MPs (even though it hadn’t saved excellent councillors and MEPs). 

Our biggest mistake in responding to that finding was to offer up a diet of backward-looking self-congratulation on what we had achieved in coalition. 

There were indeed many Lib Dem achievements in office of which we should be proud, and no one else would blow the trumpet for them. But many were in the earlier years so no longer news, and all were by definition done with Tory consent so they had shared credit in some cases. 

Above all, voters simply aren’t motivated by gratitude, as Paddy regularly acknowledged. Yet on and on we warbled like a cracked record.

You can read the whole article in Liberator 375.

Nick Harvey says the Lib Dems fell for their own propaganda

Photo by Amanda Reynolds, Ministry of Defence

Groupthink, says Wikipedia, is

a psychological phenomenon that occurs within a group of people, in which the desire for harmony or conformity in the group results in an irrational or dysfunctional decision-making outcome. Group members try to minimize conflict and reach a consensus decision without critical evaluation of alternative viewpoints, by actively suppressing dissenting viewpoints, and by isolating themselves from outside influences.

After the Liberal Democrats were turned to chutney at the May 2015 general election, a number of people who had left the party in the days after the Coaliton was formed asked we had not seen the inevitable coming.

The answer, I suspect, is groupthink.

That is certainly the conclusion Nick Harvey comes to in an article in the new issue of Liberator:

Somehow, though stuck at 8% in national polls, we clung to the idea that incumbency would save MPs (even though it hadn’t saved excellent councillors and MEPs). 

Our biggest mistake in responding to that finding was to offer up a diet of backward-looking selfcongratulation on what we had achieved in coalition. There were indeed many Lib Dem achievements in office of which we should be proud, and no one else would blow the trumpet for them. But many were in the earlier years so no longer news, and all were by definition done with Tory consent so they had shared credit in some cases. 

Above all, voters simply aren’t motivated by gratitude, as Paddy regularly acknowledged. Yet on and on we warbled like a cracked record.

You can subscribe to Liberator via the magazine's website.

Conservative candidate for North Devon once called rural voters "straw-sucking yokels"

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I suspect the Liberal Democrat campaign in North Devon will be greatly heartened by a story in the Western Morning News:

A Conservative candidate in one of the South West's most rural constituencies once derided the countryside as populated by "chinless foxhunters, straw-sucking yokels and whingeing farmers". 

In a newspaper column, Peter Heaton-Jones, a would-be MP in North Devon and former BBC DJ, launched an attack on the huge countryside march through central London in 2002, arguing if rural life is "so bad" they should "move to the town".

Heaton-Jones' defence is that the articles he wrote for the Evening Advertiser in Swindon were designed to provoke a response - he was also a 'shock jock' for BBC Wiltshire - and were "not my views".

But if you put your name to views you do not really hold, you can hardly complain if they later come back to bite you,

Six of the Best 503

"We simply can’t afford to do it all, all the while ruling out any more cuts to army numbers. The real gamble with the nation’s security is making a currently purpose-less weapon a financial priority." Nick Harvey explains how a like-for-like renewal of Trident would be a gamble with Britain's security.

Mark Thompson looks at Labour's hypocrisy on government advertising.

'Adventures in Tory Land: Democracy in Middle England' by Katie Barron, says a reviewer on Amazon, "tells us something about both human nature and the trials of being a foot soldier in Nick Clegg's army after five years of coalition government".

"The novel was immediately popular when it first appeared, in 1951, and as its reach grew so did the pool of potential Ricardians. Tey’s dissection of received history prompted readers to question... everything they had been taught." Sara Polsky on the role that Josephine Tey's 'The Daughter of Time' played in reopening the question of Richard III's character.

The Gentle Author visits Boughton House near Geddington in Northamptonshire.

Down at Third Man on Richie Benaud's place in Australian cricket.

Six of the Best 480

Nick Harvey paid tribute to the former Liberal Party leader Jeremy Thorpe at his funeral on Friday.

"Far from completing the modernisation they once promised they have, in large part, abandoned the project. As a result the electorate, generally speaking, reckons the Tories just as extreme as Ukip." Alex Massie on the failure of Cameron and Osborne.

Tiffany Jenkins dissects the left's current enthusiasm for censorship.

Vladimir Putin is living in another world, says Cicero's Songs.

"The Ronald Pinn I created from the distant memory of a young man in a graveyard became, in imitation of the bent police officers who inspired his creation, an illegal alien in a world of bespoke reality." In a long and fascinating piece, Andrew O'Hagan examines identity in the modern world.

Jack Spicer Adams has a photo essay on Birmingham Central Library: "I went to say goodbye to this divisive Birmingham landmark and fine example of brutalist architecture. I’ll be sad to see it go."

Jeremy Thorpe remembered

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The fall of Jeremy Thorpe had already taken place by the time I joined the Liberal Party, but he was its leader when it won the by-election victories in the early 1970s that helped get me interested in politics.

In his pomp Thorpe was a dazzling figure - though without the intellectual appeal of Jo Grimond - and Jonathan Fryer was from just the generation to be dazzled by him:

I first met Jeremy when I was Secretary of the Oxford University Liberal Club about 1971 and he came to speak at the Oxford Union, as Liberal Leader. He was funny and gracious, a scintillating speaker and at heart a great showman. Which other party leader in those days would have dreamt of conducting an election tour by hovercraft?

As Jonathan goes on to say, Thorpe  nearly destroyed the Liberal Party by his "feasting with panthers". Legend has it that some Young Liberals were so alarmed by the company he was keeping and the risks he was running that they went to the chief whip.

There were others who disliked Thorpe because of the way he ran the party and its finances, though the details of those arguments are probably lost in time by now.

Then came the court case at the Old Bailey where he was tried for conspiracy to murder and acquitted. Thorpe's Telegraph obituary has the basics of this, though several books were written about the case and Thorpe's wider career.

Thorpe's career was very much an act, and that act was a little too blatantly Eton and Oxford Union for my tastes - though if you read that obituary you will find his background was a little more complicated than he made it appear.

Auberon Waugh, who enlivened the 1979 contest in North Devon by standing for the Dog Lovers' Party, once said he disliked Thorpe because he dressed exactly like the bucks at his own public school.

Let's leave the last words with Nick Harvey, the current MP for the constituency:

In North Devon he was a greatly loved champion of the community and is remembered with huge affection to this day. 

It would be wrong to recall only the tragedy of his downfall - where in hindsight he can be seen largely as a casualty of the era in which he lived. Instead we should celebrate a towering force in shaping the political landscape of the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

Liberal Democrat rebellion over local government funding

George Eaton on the New Statesman's The Staggers blog picks up on the rebellion by several Liberal Democrat MPs last night:

Largely unnoticed, there was a small but significant Lib Dem rebellion over cuts to local government last night. Party president Tim Farron, former defence minister Nick Harvey, Andrew George, Stephen Gilbert and Adrian Sanders all voted against this year's funding settlement.

He goes on to quote Nick Harvey's speech in the debate:

The whole model of local Government funding is now so fundamentally broken that there needs to be a cross-party endeavour to rebuild something from scratch on a blank sheet of paper.

Nick went on to say:

Devon county council is now consulting about a programme of cuts that will end all its non-statutory obligations: ending the subsidy on meals on wheels; closing its day centres; getting rid of all its residential care homes; axing mobile libraries and the smaller local libraries; and doing away with the youth service, except for young offenders. This will cause absolute fury on the part of voters. I do not think that it is acceptable. 

We have people moving into our area who are aghast at the low level of public services that they find in comparison with other parts of the country that they have come from. This is just not acceptable. It cannot go on like this. I made a speech similar to this last year. I told Ministers that they needed to do something about it if they wanted my support in the Lobby. A year has gone by, they have done nothing about it and they will not have my support in the Lobby this evening.

You can read his whole speech on They Work for You - which is a much better site than the Hansard one, incidentally. As Nick says, there is an element of cynical calculation here. The government hopes that is local authorities who will be blamed for these cuts.

Blogging about the proposal for a unitary council for Leicestershire the other day, I made similar points:

In pursuing austerity the Coalition has tended to protect central government programmes while hitting local spending hard - there is money for HS2 while local bus services are cut. 

The danger is that local government services - and here the very structure of local government - will be damaged so severely that they will be impossible to repair when the public finances are healthy again.

I think this is a huge problem for the Lib Dems. For as long as anyone can remember, we have presented ourselves as the champions of local government. Yet when given a chance of power we embrace a policy that sees local government funding slashed.

There is plenty about localism in the Coalition agreement: it is just that it has been ignored ever since.

As I have said before, that agreement reads more and more like the portrait of a government that Britain needed but did not get. The blame for this lies largely with David Cameron - too weak to take on his own backbenchers - but it is the Lib Dems who are being punished for it by the voters.

Nick Clegg's flagship free school meals policy runs aground

When Nick Clegg announced his policy of free school meals for all children in infant schools I was surprised.

Not just surprised because this was not Liberal Democrat policy: surprised at the way my fellow party members took to their blogs and Twitter to enthuse about it.

To me it seemed an odd policy for a government whose existence is predicated on the need for austerity. It sounded like the sort of thing that came towards the end of the Blair/Brown years. Desirable, perhaps, but extraordinarily expensive.

Nick Harvey put it well - and colourfully - in an interview with Huffington Post back in November:

"It was absolutely astonishing. It came from nowhere," he exclaims. "It seemed to be part of some coalition deal where it was meant to make the Lib Dems feel better about allowing the Tories to progress their wretched married couples tax allowance. I am supposed to rejoice at this other policy that seems to me to be squandering a lot of money". 

It's not that Harvey is opposed to free school meals. Far from it. He has been campaigning on it from both within and from without government for some time. His problem is that, in a time of squeezed public spending, he wanted the free lunch to be given to poor children from when they started school at five to when they finished at 18. 

Instead, Clegg decided to give the money to the youngest children while doing nothing for those who were older but poorer. The idea is to gradually roll it out to all age groups. But Harvey suspects this may take such a long time as to never happen. 

"Suddenly bunny comes out of hat," Harvey mimes. "Someone, somewhere, has found £600m a year we didn’t know about down the back of a filing cabinet and has come up with the brilliant brainwave that the best way to spend it is to give a free school meal to all five, six and seven year olds - regardless of their income level. I am sitting there, gawping in open-mouthed astonishment," he says.

Now, not unsurprisingly with a policy over which there was no consultation, that the implementation of Nick's bright idea is running into all sorts of problems.

Oliver Wright itemises them on the Independent website:

The first sign of trouble came in last month’s Comprehensive Spending Review. When the scheme was announced, Mr Clegg said it would cost the Government £635m. But three months later, George Osborne admitted the cost had risen by 20 per cent to £785m. No one, it appeared, had taken into account the cost of upgrading kitchens and extending school dining rooms to cope with the extra demand. 

Since then, things have got even more problematic. The DfE has no idea which schools need money to upgrade their facilities. There are more than 16,000 primary schools in England – some big, some small, some with adequate facilities, some with none. But because free school meals need to be in place by September for the start of the academic year, there is not enough time to do an assessment of which schools and areas need money and which do not.

It's worse than that. It's not just that the pledge proving expensive and the money is being allocated in a worryingly random way: it turns out that honouring it is impractical in many schools:

Initially, the Government made a commitment that the free meal would be a hot one. A statement on the DfE website said: “The Government will fund schools in England to provide every child in reception, year 1 and year 2 with a hot, nutritious meal at lunchtime.” 

Now the Department says this is an aspiration rather than a commitment, because they’ve “discovered” that in many small schools the “dining room” doubles up as the gym and assembly hall, a space which is needed for lessons and activities. 

Hot meals take longer to prepare and serve. Small children eat slowly and many schools simply cannot fit an extended lunchtime into their school day. As a result, the Department has accepted that a packed lunch that can be eaten in classrooms will now count as a “nutritious meal at lunchtime”.

And by a not very pleasing irony, the policy threatens to undercut Nick's very favourite policy the Pupil Premium. How do you give extra funding to children who get free schools when all children get free school meals?

The root of these problems is the lack of consultation - something no Liberal should be guilty of. As Wright says:

The sad truth is that all these problems could – and should – have been foreseen. There are hundreds of policy officials in Whitehall whose job it is to work through problems, find solutions and devise policy that works. 

But in this case, they didn’t even know about it. The policy was put together on the back of an envelope to provide a catchy announcement for the Lib Dems to trumpet at their party conference.

Come to think of it, Nick could even have discussed the policy with his own party first.

Nick Harvey says we must get a better deal if we go into coalition again

Nick Harvey has given an interview to the Huffington Post that is well worth reading.

In it he - rightly, I think - questions Nick Clegg's enthusiasm for giving free school dinners to all children at infants schools while doing nothing more for older poor children:

"Someone, somewhere, has found £600m a year we didn’t know about down the back of a filing cabinet and has come up with the brilliant brainwave that the best way to spend it is to give a free school meal to all five, six and seven year olds - regardless of their income level. I am sitting there, gawping in open-mouthed astonishment."

Harvey also considers how the party may react if the next general election again produces a hung parliament:

"I don’t think you should take it as read there would be a stampede to join a coalition again," he cautions. "I think there would be serious debate to be had inside the Lib Dems as to whether we would do better to remain outside of government and let them form a minority government."

He and the interviewer between them also make a point that those who are debating which other party we should form a coalition with must take on board:

"We won’t get the choice. We don’t need to trouble ourselves. We are talking about a fluke within a fluke." This is because the Lib Dems will stick to the line that the party which wins the most votes and most seats will get the first chance to form a government. And it is also unlikely that the electoral maths will enable the Lib Dems to pick which larger party to drag over the finish line.

But for me the most important point Harvey makes is one not picked out by the headline writer. Because he questions the deal that was struck to form the Coalition:

"It was completely unacceptable to ask a national political party like the Lib Dems to come into government on a comprehensive deal and then have some departments in which there is no Lib Dem minister," he says. "Why on earth should we support any executive action or any legislation which came form a department in which we don’t have a minister, it's absolutely preposterous." 

"If you don’t agree with something don’t agree to it," Harvey says, slapping his leg for emphasis. "In the nature of the horse trading that has gone on we have agreed to a lot of things that we don’t basically agree with and I don’t think we would make that same mistake again."

I am hearing reports of disquiet on the Liberal Democrat backbenches at the moment.They are such a disparate bunch that you suspect there may be as many reasons for this as there are backbenchers.

But the critique Nick Harvey offers in this interview is an important one and should be listened to by the leadership.

Nick Harvey and the job of Liberal Democrat chief whip

"Did Nick Harvey turn down the job of Lib Dem chief whip?" asked Liberal Democrat Voice the other day.

I have it on good authority that the answer is yes.

Lord Bonkers' Diary: Goodnight, good knight

And so another week at Bonkers Hall draws to its close. Perhaps that is just as well,

Sunday

Sir Nicholas Harvey rings at last with some news.

“Good knight…” I begin, entering into the spirit of things.

“Goodnight” he replies and puts the phone down.

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

Earlier this week in Lord Bonkers' Diary

• Too many knights
• Escape from Liberal Youth
• On the knight bus
• Why isn't Sarah Teather a knight?
• In support of equal marriage
• "Go out and look at Uranus"