On the left, Tim Farron...GALLOWS humour prevails among Liberal Democrats. “I didn’t expect it to be a wondrous romp to 325 seats and an overall Liberal Democrat majority,” jokes Tim Farron, the party’s former president and now a candidate for its leadership, of its collapse from 56 to just eight MPs at the general election. Norman Lamb, his rival, observes that the leadership race, which ends on July 16th, “is an election which at last a Liberal Democrat is going to win”. Neither man struggled to obtain the nominations of 10% of his parliamentary colleagues required to make the ballot paper—which, as party staff grimly note, meant each needed the support of fully 0.8 MPs.
If the Lib Dems seem punch drunk, that is understandable: after five difficult years as junior coalition partners to the Conservatives, on May 7th the party lost two-thirds of its votes and many parliamentary seats that it had held for decades. On the verge of tears, Nick Clegg, its leader, resigned on the morning after the election.
But the race to replace him matters despite the scale of the party’s defeat,...Continue reading
via Brian Rushton, The battle for the ruins
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