Earlier in the year Duncan Brack asked me to review a special edition of the academic journal Political Quarterly about the Liberal Democrats, edited by Richard Grayson, for the Journal of Liberal History.

The review’s now been published and I’ve posted it here. The chapters of the original PQ edition are available to download free as PDFs here.

I think the PQ edition is a really unusually good guide to who we as a party are, and I’ve used the opportunity to reflect on some of the big themes myself.

Throughout all this speculation about a possible General Election, I have argued that it is just Mr Brown winding everyone up, and he is not really planning to have an election this year. I set out the case for this here, and certainly he does really seem to have used the threat to tie Mr Cameron in knots over the summer.

However I have to admit that I have been wavering over the last few days. Several of the speeches in Bournemouth this week seem to have been very much geared up to trying to win votes in the near future. And there comes a point in the development of speculation about an election - speculation which is after all generated entirely by his own people - when it looks like either or both (a) weakness and/or (b) that you are just playing games with the electorate, not to call it. I should think that we are coming up on that point pretty imminently now - indeed already if he were to announce that it was all off, he would surely face some slightly awkward questions about why he had been ramping it all up so much and winding up the public when he had no intention of bringing it to a climax. The balloon has not yet gone up but it will need a bit of effort to haul it down and secure it again. It looks like pretty blatant political manipulation and I have argued before that his fondness for this is, sooner or later, going to p*** people off.

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Last week I had the honour of chairing party conference’s debate on Israel and the Palestinian Territories. It was a very high calibre debate on an extremely sensitive issue and we managed to get through it without anyone departing from the measured tone of a conference debate, despite the strongly held views.

Unsurprisingly, a large number of people wanted to speak in the debate and submitted speaking cards. However we only had an hour, and so I was only able to call half of those who had wanted to speak.

This is where it got interesting for me. I was mildly horrified to discover later in the bars how some (not all) of those who had been called thought I had called them because I wanted to do them personally a favour, and conversely even more how people who had not got the chance to speak, thought I had made a decision not to call them for some personal reason as that I didn’t know or like them.

This really is not the basis for how chairs to decide who to call in debates or not. I guess many of the speakers and non-speakers would realise this if they thought about it from the chair’s point of view but I guess they often don’t do that.

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Hurrah! It seems that I am apparently now officially the 47th best Liberal Democrat blog! I am so chuffed!

The rankings for Iain Dale’s 2007 guide to political blogging have been done by ‘a panel of Lib Dem bloggers’ and that’s where they’ve put me - at least ahead of most (but perhaps not quite all) the non-blogs which are either not really blogs at all, or only updated once a month.

But I am not going to rest on my laurels. I have set my sights even higher for the future. Next year I am aiming to be 46th best!

One of the highlights for me of Conference week was being able to get to some more fringe meetings - when I first started going to conference I used to really enjoy them but in recent years it’s been difficult to find time to get to many.

And the one I enjoyed most last week was the Lib Dem History Group’s Who is the Greatest Liberal? Meeting, held on Wednesday evening. It really was an excellent meeting with some superb speakers, and very high-level content.

Tom McNally kicked off by putting the case for John Maynard Keynes to take the title. Read the rest of this entry »

Could somebody explain to me how it is Gordon Brown is currently asking us to accept the following three propositions simultaneously?

1. He has licensed his ‘aides’ to spend almost the whole summer putting it about that he is considering calling an autumn election (and as I have argued, this strategy has delivered for him in spades, in stitching up Cameron). The fact that an early election on the agenda at all is entirely down to him - and every time speculation has looked like tailing off, his team has stoked it up again.

2. Gordon Brown is a serious man with serious ideas, strongly focussed on “getting on with the job” of running the country, facing down terrorist threats, and not to be distracted from that by piffling petty party-political considerations such as what the most advantageous moment for an election might be.

3. Gordon Brown is a new ‘non-spinning’ leader, representing a change from the age of New Labour obsession with managing the media, as happened under Blair.

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In an analysis piece on the Lib Dem Conference at the end of the week, BBC political writer Nick Assinder wrote “After a conference week dominated by chatter over his leadership, Sir Menzies Campbell needed to meet his critics…” Later in the piece he talks of a week “which was overshadowed by leadership talk”.

How does Mr Assinder justify the statement that the week was “dominated by chatter over his Leadership”?

In what sense was the week dominated by this question?

Was it one of the topics under discussion within the formal conference? Well, there were about 50 motions, debates and other sessions during the week, not one of which was about the future of the Leadership.

On the fringe, there were I believe more than 200 fringe meetings held - again, not a single one was about the future of the party’s leader.

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Starved of internet access for the week, I’m now back from Conference, and catching up on what the LD blogosphere and some of the broader media have been saying about it.

I am very pleased to see that Lib Dem Voice has been running articles on some key motions and keeping people updated, as well as debunking some of the nonsensical media interpretations of it (I mean really the BBC’s claim today that the conference was “dominated by chatter over [Ming's] leadership” is just drivel. It is completely ludicrous to say this. This issue did not remotely dominate my conference or those I was hanging out with - but then I was only actually physically there, so what on earth would I know?).

I’ve got a few reflections of my own on the week which I’ll try and get posted up over the next few days (once I’ve caught up on some sleep…)