"Morals more akin to the Mafia": Chris Huhne on the methods of the Murdoch empire

Chris Huhne says the public documents in the cases brought by three former Liberal Democrat ministers - Vince Cable, Norman Lamb and Huhne himself - show that phone-hacking was directed by News Group executives who had no journalistic role.

This hacking, claims Huhne in an article for Byline Times, had two objectives:

The first was to target political figures who were perceived to be unsympathetic to News and Murdoch in order to smooth the way for achieving the boss's is objectives. 

The second was to gather intelligence from the heart of government in order to further News's objectives, in particular, the purchase of the 61 per cent of Sky - BSkyB - that the Murdoch's family did not own. Murdoch wanted to stop ministers referring the bid for a time-consuming review - and possible veto - by the competition authorities.

The reason this is so important is because is because it is about using illegal information gathering for corporate purposes is such as spying and getting rid of opponents and obstacles.

Read the full article on Byline Times. It will 

Make thy two eyes like stars start from their spheres,

Thy knotted and combined locks to part,

And each particular hair to stand on end

Like quills upon the fretful porpentine.

Journalists are entitled to quiz Ed Davey about the Horizon scandal and he should apologise for his part in it

I cannot share the outrage among my fellow Liberal Democrats at the questioning of Ed Davey over his actions as the minister responsible for the Post Office

Those actions are bound to be of interest to the media. Ed is a party leader and one of the few ministers to have held that role in the relevant period who is still at the forefront of politics.

If you doubt that, read the names of the others: Ian McCartney, Alan Johnson, Douglas Alexander, Stephen Timms, Gerry Sutcliffe, Jim Fitzpatrick, Pat McFadden, Lord Young, Norman Lamb, Jo Swinson, Jenny Willott, Jo Baroness Nevill-Rolfe, Margot James, Andrew Griffiths, Kelly Tolhurst, Paul Scully, Jane Hunt, Dean Russell, Kevin Holinrake.

I wonder how many of them you would recognise if they sat down next to you on the bus. So Ed is bound to be of interest to journalists reporting the Horizon scandal.

Nor do I understand the determination that Ed should not apologise for his failure to challenge the Post Office's story.

While doing so he could fairly point out he was the first minister to meet campaigners and that until a whistleblower from Fujitsu appeared on Panorama in August 2015, there was no hard evidence with which to challenge the Post Office's account. By then the Coalition was over, so the journalists need to talk to the Conservatives if they want to find out why nothing was done then.

No doubt Ed and the people around him could put it better than that, but I fear his current defensiveness is not serving him well.

Some fear the headline "Ed Davey Apologises", reasoning the media will come back for more. But I suspect the headline "Ed Davey Refuses to Apologise" has been more harmful.

If we want something to say on Horizon beyond a defence of our leader's actions, I suggest we think about what Andy Burnham has been saying about the "unelected state" and read the Andrew Rawnsley article in the Observer tomorrow: 'The abuse of unaccountable power is at the wicked heart of the Post Office scandal.'

Vince Cable, Chris Huhne and Norman Lamb sue Sun and News of the World publisher over phone hacking

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Claiming an exclusive, the Guardian reports that three senior Liberal Democrat politicians, Vince Cable, Chris Huhne and Norman Lamb, are

suing the publisher of the Sun and the defunct News of the World, claiming that their phones were hacked for stories or to “exert political influence”, including when Rupert Murdoch was seeking approval for a takeover of BSkyB.

Journalists working at Murdoch’s newspapers are said to have unlawfully targeted the former business secretary Vince Cable as well as Chris Huhne, a former energy and climate change secretary, and Norman Lamb, a whip and sometime adviser to the then deputy prime minister, Nick Clegg.

The purpose of the attempts to access the men’s voicemail messages during their time in coalition with the Conservatives and to carry out other “unlawful information gathering” had been to source stories about them in order to “sell newspapers”, but to also influence political events, according to the claims lodged at the high court, which have been denied.

The report goes on to say that Vince Cable claims that between 27 July 2004 and 31 December 2011, a total of 383 calls were made by journalists at the Wapping headquarters of the Sun and News of the World, "the overwhelming majority of which he will infer were made for the purposes of unlawfully intercepting his voicemail messages".

GUEST POST Abandoning the War on Drugs would bring Britain so many benefits

Lee Dargue says legalising and regulating currently illegal drugs would bring us benefits in all sorts of areas.

Politicians (and press officers) are always after policies that that can easily explain, that will attract the public, and bring tangible results.

How about a policy that will reduce:

• crime (organised criminal gangs (OCGs), violent and sexual crime, burglary, theft, car crime), 
• the number of knives and guns on our streets
• street gangs
• the exploitation of people of all ages (including via ‘county lines’)
• health harms (to people and public health), thus reducing the strain on our health and care services.

whilst also increasing:

• liberty for people who aren’t harming others
• time for the police to spend on 'everyday' criminal matters in their neighbourhoods
• safety and cleanliness of our streets and communities.

All of this could be achieved by the UK legalising and regulating currently illegal drugs. Note that I said reduce bad things and increase good things - it’s not a silver bullet for all these matters, but it is a single bullet to help with all of them.

The crime described is largely funded by the production, distribution, and supply of illicit drugs. The most well-known include cannabis, heroin, and crack (the most potent version of cocaine, which is smoked). 

The sale of these items produces vast amounts of money for individuals and OCGs, which also harming people who take them – largely because the products they take, being illegal, are subject to no quality control.

In all the elections I’ve ran in (Westminster, local and a European) I’ve bought up drug law reform campaigns, including my view that we should legalise currently illegal drugs. 

Aside from a few nervous people (who calm quickly when I chat with them after the event) the audience of any hustings either agrees or is largely dispassionate about the matter. There isn’t a howl of panic (we leave that to the “newspapers” that make up stories on drugs to worry their readers). 

Indeed, the only time I had someone shout at me was at my own Party’s conference in 2017, where, supporting a policy of legalising cannabis, I was accused of genocide in North Africa. Thankfully it was a lone view! 

So, despite not finding any horror, or even much disagreement to my proposals (even the usually panicked press were neutral or supportive when they reported on the aforementioned conference policy), why are most politicians reticent to promote the idea? 

For some, such as Labour and Tory frontbenchers, they cling to the outdated notion that the 'War on Drugs' is either going well (it isn’t) or that they must maintain their 'tough on crime' chest-beating stance. 

The War on Drugs, started by the most discredited - sorry, second most discredited - US President, Nixon, is steeped in racism and an authoritarian grasp of power, not the harm reduction and public health approaches we need (and that Britain had before we succumbed to international pressure) has been favoured by all governments since the introduction of the harm-inducing Misuse of Drugs Act 1971. 

The small glimmer of hope that liberals in coalition in 2010 could change the narrative was quashed, when Home Office minister Norman Baker quit in exasperation of the Theresa May-led department being too difficult to work in, where even discussion of matters like drug law reform were effectively outlawed. Baker asked simply that we review evidence, but this, par for the course, was too much for the Tory government. 

Since then, (now former) Lib Dem MP Norman Lamb, Labour MP Jeff Smith, and Conservative MP Crispin Blunt tried hard to keep drug law reform on the radar and others too. However, it’s largely still a taboo issue. 

More worryingly, the Lib Dems seem to have fallen silent on the matter – and there is an active policy of supporting a legalised, regulated market for cannabis. 

Whilst I’d like all readers to get on the bus of drug law reform, I urge the Lib Dems to reignite (no pun intended) their cannabis policy, for liberty, for public health and protection, and yes, even for politics - to tap into the growing number of voters who think it’s time we re-thought our country’s draconian, unworkable laws on prohibition.

Whilst I’ve focused on the political element here, there are many fantastic organisations that campaign and educate on drug law reform, and, at the known risk of leaving many out, I’d advise you to look out for Transform, Anyone’s Child, Release and LEAP for starters. 

The Neil Woods book (no, I don’t get kickbacks) Drug Wars is a great starter for all those wanting to learn more.

Lee Dargue is a Liberal Democrat activist from Birmingham. You can follow him on Twitter.

A church on the edge: St Mary's, Happisburgh

I visited Happisburgh once. I wanted to see the eroding cliffs and liked the unexpected way its name was pronounced.

Simon Knott shows you the cliffs, pronounces the village's name correctly and shows you Happisburgh's fine church.

One story he does not tell is the one about Arthur Conan Doyle staying at the inn in the village and being inspired by the landlord's young son and his interest in codes to write the Sherlock Holmes story The Adventure of the Dancing Men.

In 2006 Norman Lamb unveiled a plaque commemorating Conan Doyle's visit.

North Norfolk Lib Dems choose Steffan Aquarone as their PPC

Steffan Aquarone has been chosen to fight North Norfolk for the Liberal Democrats at the next general election.

This is the seat held for the party by Norman Lamb between 2001 and 2019.

The Eastern Daily Press reports that Steffan won 93 per cent of the votes of local Liberal Democrats in the selection process.

Norman Lamb on his time as a minister... and Danny Alexander

Norman Lamb has been interviewed by the Institute for Government for its Ministers Reflect series.

You can see a short clip from it above and read the full transcript on the IfG website. (The interview took place in March 2020.)

As the Liberal Democrats could find themselves part of a coalition government after the next election, it's important that we learn from our unhappy experience between 2010 and 2015. So this interview makes useful reading.

But it may not make happy reading for Danny Alexander, who does not come out of it well.

Here, for instance, is Norman Lamb talking about his role as Nick Clegg's parliamentary private secretary, which he took on after the offer of a ministerial role was clumsily withdrawn:

I found it to be a fairly hollow role. I was involved in central discussions and I became part of the core team around Nick, but I was also conscious that the power lay with Nick and Danny - Nick primarily went to Danny and not anyone else - which caused, I think, some frustration amongst many people. A lot of people felt that Danny wasn't necessarily the best influence on Nick, and I still feel that strongly.

And when asked by the interviewer to expand on this point, Lamb says:

I think that Danny was hopeless on the health reforms, he passed it all and didn’t really understand the issues, in my view. In my view, the great sadness was David Laws falling early as the chief secretary .... The caricature of David was as right wing, as a sort of Tory in disguise, but actually, internally, he wasn’t. He was the one who was fighting against ending the indexing of benefits, he was fighting for a real terms increase in education spend and a real value to the pupil premium. 

His fall from the Treasury meant that we lost an intellectually coherent Liberal in the Treasury. We ended up with someone who was trying to convince Tories that he could be trusted doing this vital role of chief secretary to the Treasury. It was a case of overcompensating, which you quite often see.

That overcompensation was pretty much official Liberal Democrat strategy after 2010 - you can learn that from an article written by Nick Clegg's then political adviser, Richard Reeves, in 2012.

Reeves thought the Liberal Democrats had first to prove they were mature enough to be in government, but it is hard to imagine any other party burdening itself with this demand when it had just won a share of power through the ballot box.

A better model, Norman Lamb suggests, was that offered by Norman Baker as a transport minister. Lamb recalls that Philip Hammond (then the transport secretary) complaining to him that Baker was difficult to work with and did not comply with the protocols:

Norman, who I’ve got a lot of time for, was a press junkie who was just going off and actually doing what he ought to be doing, I think getting the message out there about what a Lib Dem minister was achieving. 

Lamb goes on to add:

The interesting thing was that the two of them ended up getting on quite well in transport and having a degree of mutual respect, I think because they were both assiduous - I think the dynamic ended up working quite well.

So next time we Liberal Democrats find ourselves in coalition, we need to have more confidence in ourselves and in the approach to the country's problems that we have just fought an election on.

And we need to make sure  we have someone at the treasury with the intellectual equipment and confidence to stand up for themselves.

In 2010 our front bench had as much expertise on economics, if not more, as those of the two larger parties. Think Vince Cable, Chris Huhne, David Laws and Steve Webb. We should have drawn on that pool of talent and used Danny Alexander's talents differently.

You can explore all the Ministers Reflect interviews on the Institute for Government website.

18 April in Liberal England history

I'm not going anywhere any time soon, so I though I would look back to see what I was blogging about on this day in past years.

2019

Lord Bonkers questioned the Liberal Democrats' fondness for giant orange diamonds.


2018

I announced that I had discovered this anthem for Brexit...




2017

A general election campaign was underway and I posted the top 20 Lib Dem targets, based on the results in 2015. We were to win seven of them, plus one from outside the list - Layla Moran in Oxford West and Abingdon. Trouble is, we also lost five of the nine seats we held.when the election was called.


2016

I posted a video of the Great Central - Nottingham, which I once described as a bit of a mystery to us in Leicestershire - "Rather like the Eastern Roman Empire."


2015

Lord Bonkers gently mocked Norman Lamb's claim that his friends were urging him to stand for the Lib Dem leadership.


2014

I wrote about Leicester's mysterious Humber Stone and quoted a local history site on the subject:

“Boy drew creature that stood beside his bed” was a Leicester Mercury headline as recently as 1980, when a 10-year-old boy, living close to the Humber Stone, had constant “visits” from a devilish entity. It was, apparently, a creature with a goat’s head and long curving horns, a man’s body and cloven hoofs. After drawing it at school, the boy’s teacher asked what it was. “I don’t know, miss”, he said. “It’s the thing I sometimes see at the end of my bed”.

2013

Michael Gove, I argued, had been talking nonsense about the history of school holidays. They have nothing to do with the farming calendar.

2012

Lord Bonkers discussed the governance of Rutland: "We now live as an anarcho-syndicalist collective – albeit one consistent with our most ancient families continuing to enjoy full possession of their landed estates."

2011

A by-election was taking place in Leicester South and I explained why Zuffar Haq was the perfect candidate for the constituency:

He grew up and went to school in the constituency – even in the short time I was with him we came across the father of someone with whom he had been at Lancaster Boys (the school that featured in Gareth Malone’s series “Boys Don’t Sing”). I also heard him slip into Punjabi to speak to an elderly Asian voter.

He was to come second in the contest, which must count as a remarkable achievement.

2010

I celebrated some wayside discovers made in the Northamptonshire village of Maidwell. They included the remains of a footbridge over the former Market Harborough to Northampton railway line.

2009

Government and foods companies were conspiring to denigrate home cooking, or so I argued:

Personally, I find that cake pleasingly old fashioned. White icing, with a cherry on top. It's the sort of cake children scheme to win in the Beano and the Dandy.

2008

In House Points, my weekly Liberal Democrat News column, I looked at Labour and poverty:

For everyone loves children. Even the Daily Mail loves children. At any rate, it loves very young children with fair hair. And if you don’t love children, maybe keeping their parents out of poverty will lessen the chance that, high on glue and SunnyD, they will twoc your new motor.

2007

I celebrated the Middlesex opening pair of Hutton and Compton: "That's Ben (grandson of Len) and Nick (grandson of Denis)."

2006

"Lib Dems should drop their collectivist approach to education and ensure that respect for individual differences is central," I argued in an article for the Guardian's website.

2005

Recommending an article on the Collins New Naturalist series I quoted the great Victorian nature writer Richard Jefferies:

In his The Amateur Poacher he records that his early interest in the natural world had a strong sporting component, but that he came to see things differently. 

With his finger on the trigger he "hesitated, dropped the barrel and watched the beautiful bird" and:

watching so often stayed the shot that at last it grew to be a habit ... Time after time I have flushed partridges without firing, and have let the hare bound over the furrow free.

2004

I mourned the death of Geraint Howells:

He was MP for Cardigan from 1974 to 1983 and for Ceredigion and Pembroke North from 1983 to 1992, and was known to Lord Bonkers as the Big Friendly Geraint.

Norman Lamb on Rebooting Capitalism

Radix feels like a think tank that was set up to serve a new centre party that never happened, but it has published an important paper by the former Liberal Democrat MP Norman Lamb.

His recommendations in Rebooting Capitalism include:

• Using the upcoming decampment from the Palace of Westminster to move the national Parliament to the North of England, separating the UK’s economic and political capitals and building a real Northern Powerhouse.
• Devolving power radically, including over setting taxes, to cities and regions, enabling them to determine their own destiny and empowering local innovation. 
• Streamlining the creation of employee-owned businesses to encourage the transfer of ownership of businesses to their employees. 
• Setting a new lowest rate of corporation tax, applicable only to those companies which share prosperity equitably with staff.
• Setting tough new competition rules to challenge concentrations of power and wealth and to drive up wages, drive down prices and improve consumer choice.
• Reforming company law to incentivise firms to act as a force for good, recognising a wider purpose than narrow shareholder value.

Norman Lamb honoured alongside The Archers

We're signing off for the evening, but what an inspiring evening it was.

We'll leave you with this clip from Sir @NormanLamb's speech, who won the Making a Difference award. #BupaMindAwards pic.twitter.com/1GpjjZzAiB

— Mind (@MindCharity) November 13, 2019

Norman Lamb, who has just stood down as Liberal Democrat MP for North Norfolk, received the 'Making a Difference' award at last night's Mind media awards.

This award is made each year to someone in the media who has set the agenda and initiated change.

Other winners included The Archers, which won the award for soaps and continual series.

Six of the Best 887

"Last year, 1584 children were unnecessarily dragged through the courts for possession of cannabis, with four out of five being found guilty, resulting in criminal records that will haunt them for their whole lives." Norman Lamb makes the case for a legal, regulated cannabis market.

David Herdson asks why the European Research Group waved through Theresa May's withdrawal agreement at Christmas 2017.

John Bull on the Harrow and Wealdstone railway disaster of 1952, which led to the development of the modern paramedic.

"The quickest way to an audience’s heart is to kill off one or both of your character’s parents." Manvir Singh looks at the extraordinary appeal of literary orphans.

Jennie Rigg has been to see Alice Cooper.

"These years, late in the century's first decade, may have been the apogee of Trescothick's career. If his health had allowed it, he would still have been young enough and good enough to play for England, but he was forced by circumstances to tread the county game's boards instead." Brian Carpenter celebrates the career of Marcus Trescothick.

I shall be voting for Ed Davey

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Andrew Rawnsley, while recognising what an important figure the winner may turn out to be, complains that the current contest for the leadership of the Liberal Democrats is "as exciting as a bowl of tofu":

The audience in a lecture theatre at the London School of Economics asks thoughtful questions. The rivals, taking it in turn to answer, are unfailingly courteous towards each other. 

There is no shouting, interrupting or name-calling. I have heard ruder conversations between nuns. 

When one contestant speaks, the other spends a lot of time nodding along in agreement. They even smile at each other’s tepid jokes.

I have suggested in the past that the customary niceness of our leadership contests may not serve the party well.

In 2015 neither Tim Farron's views on gay sex, which were to hamper us at the 2017 general election, nor Norman Lamb's views on Europe, which might well have proved more of a burden, were subject to scrutiny.

And back in 2007, Nick Clegg was outraged when Chris Huhne pointed out that he held views on public spending that were at odds with those of the bulk of Lib Dem members.

That turned out to be very important in 2010.

The niceness and lack of disagreement this time has made it hard to decide between Ed Davey and Jo Swinson. But I have made up my mind to vote for Ed.

The reason is that I am clearer about what I would be getting from his leadership. The emphasis on the environment and belief in the Lib Dems as standard-bearers for Liberalism speaks to me and has been laid out in some detail.

Jo, by contrast, speaks of "a liberal movement" and says we must "transform the economy so it works for people and the planet".

The former may well mean no more than the handful of local pacts I supported in a post the other day, but I fear it may mean a grand strategy that falls flat. Call it David Steel Syndrome.

And the latter could appeal to me, but I have little idea of what it would mean in practice. How would party policy have to change to make it a reality? I have tried to find out but I don't know.

Jo Swinson's campaign has operated at a level of abstractness that worries me. If you want to see the difference between the two candidates, take a look at the questions Liberator put to them.

One asked if, in the event of Brexit taking place, we should become the party of "back in" the EU.

Ed said yes. Jo told us how important it is we fight Brexit, almost got round to saying yes, but then went back to telling us how important it is that we fight Brexit.

This lack of detail in Jo's answers throws me back on looking at her personality, and that has never quite appealed to me as much as obviously does to some people in the party.

In fact, I find the attitude of some of her supporters online rather grating, though it would be wrong to let that affect how I vote.

I voted for Jackie Ballard as Lib Dem leader back in 1999 and looked forward to voting for Layla Moran this time, so I am sorry not to be voting for a woman.

But it's Ed Davey for me. Better the angel you know.

In praise of Never Mind the Bar Charts and Tim Farron

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The latest edition of Mark Pack and Stephen Tall's podcast Never Mind the Bar Charts hit the net the other day.

It's a good listen - and not just because I get a mention.

Particularly valuable is the interview with Tim Farron, who has some wise things to say about what we should look for in a new leader and ask the people who want to be that leader/

And it is good to hear Tim getting credit for reacting to the EU referendum result in the right way and keep in the Liberal Democrat show on the road. What would Norman Lamb have done in the same circumstances?

Never Mind the Bar Charts, incidentally, supports my contention that a podcast needs two voices to work.

We should not be afraid If policy differences emerge between Jo Swinson and Ed Davey

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With characteristic benevolence, Caron Lindsay on Liberal Democrat Voice looks forward to a "friendly" Lib Dem leadership contest.

Being of a meaner disposition, I though about a post I wrote last year:

It looks to me as though we Lib Dems are too scared of rocking the boat to have really informative leadership elections. 

Some like to talk of the "Lib Dem family," but in my experience happy families are those that can have lively discussions, even rows, and make their peace afterwards. 

We Lib Dems, by contrast, resemble an unhappy family where everyone is sat around the dining table on their best behaviour and terrified of saying the wrong thing.

Reading the post today, I can see that I should also have mentioned Norman Lamb's sceptical view of the European Union when discussing our 2015 leadership election.

I've never been sure quite what Norman believes here or whether his attempts to distance himself from the rest of the party arise simply from the prevailing view of the matter among his electors in Norfolk. But some of the names that worked on his campaign do make you raise your eyes. 

Had he been elected in 2015, I suspect his view of the EU would have been at least as big a problem for the party as Tim Farron's worries about gay sex turned out to be.

I don't know if there are policy difference between Jo Swinson and Ed Davey. I hope some do emerge and that they will be robustly debated.

If we can be robust and friendly, so much the better.

The runners and riders in the Lib Dem leadership election

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MoneyWeek has an article about the betting market on the forthcoming Liberal Democrat leadership election.

Ladbrokes are offering the following odds:

Jo Swinson              Evens
Layla Moran             11/8
Ed Davey                   8/1
Tom Brake                20/1
Norman Lamb          33/1
Alistair Carmichael   50/1
Jamie Stone             50/1
Tim Farron              100/1

The author, Dr Matthew Partridge, suggests that Layla Moran represents the value bet - particularly at the slightly more generous odds being offered by Betfair

Mortal thoughts on the Lib Dems and a new centre party

A sobering paragraph* in Isabel Hardman's Evening Standard article on the prospects for a new centre party:

 It is certainly the case that none of those wavering Labourites would defect straight to the Lib Dems if they ever do manage to find the courage to leave their own party. Many of them confess to feeling very politically close to certain Lib Dems such as Norman Lamb and Jo Swinson, but feel the Lib Dem brand is damaged beyond repair. 

Even those Lib Dems who think their party can lead the change agree that there are significant branding problems. They’re quite comfortable, for instance, with the idea of the party’s name changing, and it not being what one thinker describes as ‘too precious about what we stand for, beyond being liberals, of course’. 

But isn't the Lib Dem brand so damaged because we weren't precious enough about what we stood for when we went into coalition with the Conservatives?

* It's one paragraph in the Standard. I tend to break up newspaper paragraphs when I quote them to make them easier to read online.

The mysterious Darren Grimes

Who is this paying tribute to Charles Kennedy in a BBC Newsbeat interview from June 2015?

"He would have been great in the upcoming EU referendum - he won't be known just for [his problems]. He was so much more than that." 

Why would he have been so good in the EU referendum? 

"He was always pushing for the party to be an internationalist voice. 

"He believed that in an increasingly globalised world, having Britain in Europe was the only way forward. 

"And I think that's the message the party needs pushing. And he was one of the first people to get out there and voice that."

An unremarkable, loyal Liberal Democrat view you might think.

In fact it belongs to Darren Grimes, who was to leave the party a year later and join the Conservatives because he was a "classical liberal".

He went on to head an organisation called BeLeave during the EU referendum. It was supposedly wholly independent of Vote Leave, but its funding and campaigning are now under scrutiny.

It was a remarkable transition, but we may have an intermediate form of Darren Grimes in a Lib Dem Voice article written a month after his Newsbeat interview.

There he appointed himself to speak for an entire generation and backed Norman Lamb for leader.

Which reminds us that Mark Gettleson and Christopher Wylie from Vote Leave both worked alongside Grimes on Norman's 2015 leadership campaign.

It's all very mysterious.

Lord Bonkers' Diary: The Beast from the East

I have done all I can to put it off, but the new Liberator also includes Lord Bonkers' Diary. The first entry this time clearly dates from March.

Monday

The snow has drifted high against the hedges and no traffic can reach the village, let alone tackle the drive to the Hall. If it weren’t for the secret passage that comes out in the cellar of the Bonkers' Arms, I would feel quite isolated. My fellow drinkers tell me this spell of hard weather is being called 'The Beast from the East,' which reminds me of our own Liberal Democrats’ leadership contest in 2015.

When Farron failed to give me assurances that he would not rip the pews out of St Asquith’s and make everybody sing 'Shine, Jesus, Shine,' I threw my weight behind Norman Lamb. "What you need," I told him, "is a good nickname. Why, it was when I christened Sugar Ray Michie ‘the Brute from Bute’ that she began to get title fights at the Empire Pool, Wembley, and it was the fame those won her that got her elected to Parliament." So it as that I came up with ‘The Beast from the East.’

Sadly, he ignored my advice and chose to run under the slogan "Vote Lib Dem and we’ll let you top yourself." While this undoubtedly had some appeal to exhausted canvassers, it did not prove sufficient to swing the party behind him.

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

Forget “the Lib Dem family”: Let’s have proper leadership elections

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The first Liberal Party leadership election I followed was the one between David Steel and John Pardoe in 1976.

I can recall two incidents from the campaign, the first of them being that Steel’s camp suggested Pardoe wore a wig. (Years later someone from that era told me there might have been something in it.)

The second is that the Steel-supporting Clement Freud (MP, panel-show contestant and rapist) produced a quotation from A.A. Milne to describe Pardoe’s campaigning style:

With one loud Worraworraworraworraworra he jumped at the end of the tablecloth, pulled it to the ground, wrapped himself up in it three times, rolled to the other end of the room, and, after a terrible struggle, got his head into the daylight again, and said cheerfully. "Have I won?"

Steel, incidentally, would be Rabbit, with the posse of advisers, assistants and minor Commonwealth dignitaries that used to accompany him being his equivalent of the Friends and Relations.

The point of all this is to remind my fellow Liberal Democrats that our leadership elections are not always very enlightening.

So while it would have been to see someone stand against Vince Cable last summer, there is no guarantee it would have led to the debate about our future that those keenest on a contest wanted to see.

Because I can think of two contested Lib Dem leadership elections where the debate that was ducked.
Let me first take you back to 2007 and the contest between Nick Clegg and Chris Huhne.

The most noteworthy event of the campaign was an joint appearance on BBC1’s The Politics Show on Sunday morning where a briefing from Huhne’s camp was produced by the interviewer. It was headed “Calamity Clegg” and listed instances where Clegg had endorsed cuts in public spending.
I blogged about it at the time:

Clearly, the headline "Calamity Clegg" was a huge misjudgement on someone's part - and adopting the American "flip-flop" charge was silly and vulgar - but surely we are allowed to discuss policy in a leadership campaign? 

Nick Clegg began this one by pledging to take the party out of its comfort zone, but has since failed to give us much idea of what that might involve. He can hardly complain if another candidate starts to speculate on his intentions as a result. 

And dismissing any attempt to debate policy as creating "synthetic differences ... [which] our opponents will use against us" is just silly.

As the ensuing years were to show, Nick Clegg was less wedded to high levels of public spending than the bulk of the party – just look at the cuts in local government funding the Coalition brought in if you doubt me.

This disagreement over public spending should have been at the heart of the contesnt, but there was a widespread attitude withln the party that it was poor taste of Huhne to raise it at all.

Fast forward to 2015 and Tim Farron vs Norman Lamb.

The idea that Farron’s Evangelical variety of Christianity might prove a difficulty for him as leader was in the air, but for the most part it was raised obliquely.

Lamb put a lot of emphasis on his support for the ‘right to die’ because, I suggested at the time, it was an issue where most Lib Dem members agreed him but one where Farron’s beliefs would make it hard for him to do so.

If Lamb had raised Farron’s religion more directly, I doubt his action would have been well received within the party. Certainly, when some of Lamb’s supporters engaged in what sounded like negative push-polling, it was an embarrassment to him.

The result was that Farron’s religion was not discussed and the suggestion it might prove a handicap to him as leader was never broached.

It looks to me as though we Lib Dems are too scared of rocking the boat to have really informative leadership elections.

Some like to talk of the “Lib Dem family,” but in my experience happy families are those that can have lively discussions, even rows, and make their peace afterwards.

We Lib Dems, by contrast, resemble an unhappy family where everyone is sat around the dining table on their best behaviour and terrified of saying the wrong thing.

Cambridge Analytica whistleblower offered to help the Lib Dems

For more than a year we’ve been investigating Cambridge Analytica and its links to the Brexit Leave campaign in the UK and Team Trump in the US presidential election

says Carole Cadwalladr, presumably in tomorrow's Observer.

Her article is an interview with Christopher Wylie, and he turns out to have previously offered his services to the Liberal Democrats:

“I wanted to know why the Lib Dems sucked at winning elections when they used to run the country up to the end of the 19th century,” Wylie explains. “And I began looking at consumer and demographic data to see what united Lib Dem voters, because apart from bits of Wales and the Shetlands it’s weird, disparate regions. And what I found is there were no strong correlations. There was no signal in the data. 

“And then I came across a paper about how personality traits could be a precursor to political behaviour, and it suddenly made sense. Liberalism is correlated with high openness and low conscientiousness, and when you think of Lib Dems they’re absent-minded professors and hippies. They’re the early adopters… they’re highly open to new ideas. And it just clicked all of a sudden.” 

Here was a way for the party to identify potential new voters. The only problem was that the Lib Dems weren’t interested. 

“I did this presentation at which I told them they would lose half their 57 seats, and they were like: ‘Why are you so pessimistic?’ They actually lost all but eight of their seats, FYI.”

An earlier Carole Cadwalladr article mentioned that a former Lib Dem, Mark Gettleson, was also part of the Cambridge Analytica/Leave nexus. He was involved with Norman Lamb's leadership campaign in 2015.