I’m sad to hear that Ming has resigned tonight.

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.

The author list of Liberator magazine is a shifting cast of people mostly associated with the party, and the diversity of its contributors is one of the things that make it most interesting and valuable.

But one person seems to have an article in almost every edition, and it’s always very interesting to see the sometimes awkward challenges that Simon Titley poses.

In the conference edition, he takes a look at the party itself, and his headline is that party members should stop complaining about our leader. One of his key points is one I have made here - that those complaining do not have any idea what their attacks would achieve other than making themselves feel better - what he describes as “attack[ing] your own leader in public with little thought for the consequences and no coherent idea of what might be done instead’.

But he goes on from the leadership issue to make the case, which I broadly (if not in every element) agree with, that the party generally needs to be much more effective in, and give a higher priority to, engaging in the battle of ideas. Read the rest of this entry »

Over the last few weeks there have been lots of preparations for a possible election going on, including the manifesto, in conditions of great secrecy - so much so that I wasn’t even sure I should reveal the existence of Saturday’s meeting of the Federal Policy Committee to finalise it. But since I see a mass email referring to it has now come out from Chris Rennard, I guess I can do so (and I see that Alex Wilcock has reached the same conclusion, in an excellent and full analysis of the current situation).

Clearly I can’t say much about what’s in the manifesto but I will say that I thought Saturday’s was one of the best meetings of the FPC that I have been to in my six years’ involvement (and we meet every month). It was a good meeting and I think it is a very good document.

Read the rest of this entry »

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.

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

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 »

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

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…)