Fall is well and truly upon us, and yesterday afternoon we took a beautiful autumnal walk around Highgate Cemetery.
It is very much a creation of the nineteenth century - one of several cemeteries built following the need for more burial space during the rapid expansion of London, and before the twentieth century vogue of cremation. And it feels very Victorian gothic, containing graves or other tombs which are at the least very grand and proper, normally topped by at least an angel or some other statue, and in many cases magnificently more: several large family mausoleums, as well as areas of catacombs. Most famously there is the ‘Lebanon Circle’ - a circular area of catacombs around a large central Cedar (of Lebanon); and an Eqyptian avenue reflecting the fashion of interest in Egypt at one point in the Victorian era.
The very leafy surroundings make it particularly evocative to be there in the autumn, and we had a beautiful fresh afternoon to be up there.
And I have been pleased with the way that as they have been interviewed over the last week first over Ming’s resignation and now in the leadership contest, various senior Liberal Democrats have used the opportunity well to get across some of the key beliefs and values that are important to us.
To many of us who spend a lot of our time kicking around such ideas these don’t always sound very new - but inexplicably many people of course don’t spend their time following every last Lib Dem policy pronouncement in great detail - and so it is very good that both the candidates and others are able to use the opportunities we now have to expose them to it.
I have in fact been surprised by how much media interest there has been in us over the last week. There certainly currently seems to be a press buzz about the contest and the future of our party that, shall we say, does not always distinguish media reporting of the Liberal Democrats!
For convenience of access I post up here both the video and text of Mr Clegg’s speech from yesterday morning (I’m afraid the video, which is from YouTube, is missing just the first couple of paragraphs of the speech).
I would like to say a few words about my plans for the future.
But before I do, I would like to pay tribute to my close friend and colleague Menzies Campbell.
Ming is a man of integrity, honour and decency. Over the years he has also shown himself to be a man of impeccable judgement and extraordinary political courage. He led the opposition to the Iraq war. He stood firm against this government’s criminal disregard for our hard won freedoms and rights. He has done our country a great service. He stabilized the Liberal Democrats in a time of crisis. He made us more professional. And he gave us a clear sense of direction and purpose. He has done our party a great service too.
It sets out typically fluently his vision for how the Liberal Democrats can best move forward and serve the British people. It’s best summed up in one phrase of his, I think: Read the rest of this entry »
Over the last few years I have come to know and, at different points, have collaborated together with both of the two main leadership contenders (as well as Steve Webb, who while I was writing this, seems to have withdrawn from the race!).
But the one I will be voting for is Nick Clegg.
I’ll be doing that because I believe he would bring to the leadership of our party many of the things which would give us the opportunity to break forward from the plateau that we have reached over the last few years, following rapid success through the 1990s.
Firstly, he obviously has undoubted skills in presenting what he and we believe, in a way which is not only liberal, but which comes across well to normal people, as well as paid-up Lib Dems. He is very much, as was often said about Charles Kennedy, a fully-signed up member of the human race - and he has a facility in talking about real life which I think comes across very well to people who are not very interested in politics. And of course anyone who has seen him speak at party conference or elsewhere will know how effective he is at presenting political ideas too. So I can’t see any other of our MPs who can come close to him in doing the crucial part of the Leader’s job which is presenting us coherently and appealingly to the outside world.
Nick is however not just a presentable mouthpiece, of no particular fixed ideological abode - or in other words, David Cameron. I don’t say this just to be abusive about Cameron - this seems to me to be, along with their political views, to be the crucial difference between Clegg and Cameron. Read the rest of this entry »
In fact he told a whole roomful of people - and although obviously we all realised that it meant a new era for the party, no-one seemed particularly surprised. Over the last few weeks this had become quite widely known by staff and MPs and others who were interested. He had clearly given thought to smooth succession planning, and in fact had a preferred successor lined up.
As one of his Vice Chairs of the Federal Policy Committee I’ve had the opportunity to work with and get to know him over the last year and a half and have had a chance to see what he has really done for the party.
It really is absolutely true that he and his highly impressive personal team have made a complete step-change in the way that we organise and run things at a senior level. By its nature most of this is behind the scenes, but it has made a huge difference in the way the Liberal Democrats run and presents itself in public.
I’ve also had the chance to see a little of the man behind the rather austere public image. How many of the public would think, for example, that when a gap needed filling while we waited for someone to arrive at an FPC meeting that he was chairing, that he would just basically tell jokes for five minutes?
But he was also an impressive leader who very much believed in leading from the front. He didn’t trim his view just to keep everyone in the room happy: if he thought something then he went out and argued for it, within the party as well as to the world at large.
The party, many aspects of which were in a pretty confused state by January 2006, have benefitted enormously from that strength of purpose.
I’m as excited as anyone by the new opportunities that the next few months and years now open up for us as a party - and I definitely want to make sure that we make the right decisions to make the most of them.
Whoever does become leader will inherit a party which is immeasurably better placed to face the future than when Ming Campbell inherited it.
One of my original intentions with this blog, which seems over time to have slipped a bit, was not to let it be dominated only by politics.
So I’d like to extend a warm welcome to the two people who have been directed here over the last couple of days from typing into Google “Sue Lawley leather”, and also the separate person who got here from the search term “kirsty young tits”.
I hope you found something here that gave you what you wanted (though I don’t think it’s very likely!).
