Over the last year Lembit Opik MP and Baroness (Ros) Scott have been running campaigns for the election which has now finally formally started, to be the next President of the Liberal Democrats.

But the campaigns they have been running have been so different that it really feels more like they have been standing in different elections.

Ros stole a march at autumn conference last year by having her team hand out “I’m 4 Ros” badges before anyone had even really realised there was a presidential election coming up (at that point we didn’t know that we’d have another leadership election to get through before this one!). And she’s spent the year since getting widely around the party, travelling all around the country speaking at regional conference and local party events, starting her own blog and a Facebook group with more than 300 members, writing articles in party publications, and generally getting herself seen as much as possible around the party. I’d say it was a classic good internal party election campaign, and very effectively run by Ros and the man she’s married this year, “party bureaucrat” (his words!) Mark Valladares. CORRECTION: A number of people have been in touch to point out that Ros’ campaign team is in fact this group. Apologies. Anyway, I congratulate them on it!

Lembit’s campaign, on other hand, at least as far as it’s reached my attention, has mostly comprised telling some journalists that he’s planning to stand for the post, resulting in one or two pieces like a full (but not very flattering) profile in the Observer a couple of months ago - combined with his usual round of activities in the party, in his spokesman and Welsh roles, as well of course as his celebrity activities, concluding in the end with the break-up of his engagement to a former Cheeky Girl.

Most people’s view is that of the two, Ros has really done the work to ‘earn’ winning this role.
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Some time ago I was asked to write a short guide to the Liberal Democrat policy process for those wanting to know how it works. After a bit of prodding I did eventually get around to doing it, but the people who’d asked for it then told me it was too detailed!

However I do quite often still get questions about various aspects of the process, so I thought it might be of interest, and have posted it up here. It’s only six pages, and I hope it’s quite clear, as well as comprehensive.

I do get many readers here who are not in the least bit interested in the Liberal Democrats, and clearly this is not very thrilling for you!

But for those who are, I am strongly committed to explaining our party’s internal processes, and highlighting just how open they are, so I hope for such people it may be of interest. I’m happy also to answer any follow-up questions.

I thought anyone going to conference who wondered how the debates at it work, might be interested in this post I wrote just after conference last year, outlining how debates get structured and how speakers are selected for them. Many people do seem to believe that whether or not you get called depends mostly on whether in the bar last night you were rude to the person chairing the session - so it may still be a surprise to some to see that it is in fact somewhat more scientific than that!

The other day I came across an article making the familiar argument that politicians these days increasingly have no background in anything other than politics. Unlike their forbears, it is claimed, who had wide experience running other organisations, our leaders these days are woefully ill-experienced. The author of this article - George Walden, who ten years ago I regarded as the intelligent face of the Conservative party, but I’m afraid I now tend to see more as just a miserable old man - particularly compared them with Churchill.

This is now a familiar claim. But - aided by an interesting discussion at that excellent institution Liberal Drinks (which I feel strongly we should encourage to happen as widely as possible around the party, incidentally) - it strikes me that although it conforms to our general sense of the decline and convergence of politics, is not actually supported by the evidence.

I offer two main pieces of evidence against this claim.

Firstly, let’s take a look at perhaps the two greatest Prime Ministers that Britain has had (I’m not trying to start a discussion here about who Britain’s two greatest PMs were, but they seem to me a reasonable pair to pick!).

Churchill was obsessed by politics from childhood, aiming to follow his father into government. He first entered Parliament at the age of 25 and was in the Cabinet by the time he was 34. At various points in his life he made some money through writing, and in his early life had a couple of thoroughly Boys Own escapades in the battle of Omdurman and escaping from a prisoner of war camp during the Boer War. They were certainly no routine experiences. But playing soldiers in various parts of the world did not give him much sense of the varied conditions of life in his own country at the time - and it is quite clear that throughout his life his main focus was always politics and government.

Gladstone, similarly, went straight from university into Parliament at the age of 22 (6 years younger than the current youngest member of the House of Commons) after only a Grand Tour that was extremely limited by comparison to today’s gap years, and first became a Minister by the time he was 24. Although he famously had interests in theology and Homer, he never did any job not related to governing the country (or in his case, half the globe too)

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This autumn, conference representatives will elect members of the major committees responsible for running the party. If you have strong views that we should do things differently, then why don’t you stand? We are a democratic organisation, but our decisions will only reflect what members actually want if people do put themselves forward.

Information about the elections has now been published, and the deadline for nominations is 24 September. You only have to get two voting conference representatives to support you, and you don’t even have to be a conference rep yourself to stand.

Of course actually standing for election is not for everyone - I’m very aware that it does require a time commitment which is not everyone is able to give, particularly if you live a long way from London. But in that case please make sure you ask your local party voting representatives how they plan to vote, and of course if you are a voting conference rep yourself, do use this once-in-every-two-years opportunity to question candidates about what they will do. And of course if they’re already members of the committee, challenge them about what they do on it - and give them your own views. As a candidate in recent years I have received perhaps one or two requests for my views in each election - I’d like to see voters using the opportunity much more to question candidates. Several candidates put their contact details at the bottom of their manifesto - do use them!

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A summary of the report from the party reform commission chaired by Chris Bones has now finally become available, for the discussion of it at conference next month. The proposals it makes concerning the future of the party have already been the subject of much heated debate, some of it inaccurate – so now that it is finally available, it seems a good moment to take a look through the main things it says.

The first thing to say is that the commission’s case for the changes it proposes has been seriously hampered by the frankly dreadful handling of communicating its contents to party activists and members. One definition of liberalism is a commitment to dispersing power, and as a result Liberal Democrat party members’ first and most powerful reaction to any proposed changes to their party, before they have heard any actual information about them, is to suspect that they are an attempted power grab by the Leader. Not actually releasing any information about what the report contains, immediately gives it the mystique of being a “secret report”, instantly compounding this suspicion further. People immediately assume that there must be a reason why it has not been released, making this just about the worst possible way of promoting any proposals it might want to make, and this has indeed been widely and rightly criticised.

For what it’s worth, having raised this with several people concerned with managing this commission and its report, for myself I’m satisfied that there was no desire to keep any of it confidential (other than perhaps one or two small sections which relate to very specific individual staffing matters). They were concerned – understandably – to ensure that the report was presented first to those who actually commissioned it and have a legimitate right to see it first, such as the party’s Federal Executive. They felt that not doing so would mean they were also subject to criticism. I accept that for a report with such a wide-ranging remit, engaging all such stakeholders in the right way is somewhat complex. Nevertheless they could and should have done a much better job of communicating the report – for example they could at least have found some public way to explain that that was what they were doing. This is not rocket science – we have for example done a much better of communicating with the wider party in recent major policy exercises such as Meeting the Challenge/Trust in People and recent work on developing the manifesto. And apart from anything else, doing something similar with the Bones report would have made it much easier, when the time comes, to gain agreement to its proposals.

Nonetheless, we are now finally able to see the main elements of what the Bones commission are proposing and so I think we should leave behind the messy handling so far, and actually have some sensible discussion about what it proposes.

Generally, I strongly welcome the report’s general approach and most of its specific proposals. If we are to make progress as a party then we do need, as the report says, to balance building on our existing successes and doing things in new ways, and I think their proposals do suggest good new ways of doing that.

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It must have seemed like such a good idea to someone to run Boris Johnson as the Conservative candidate for Mayor of London. It seemed he had very little chance of winning, but would raise the party’s profile and, frankly, fill the embarrassingly huge gap that no-one else was coming forward to be the Tory candidate. But then, just as in 2000, the voters of London made the calculation that in the grand scheme of things the Mayoralty of London wasn’t really that important, and so seized the opportunity to vote for the maverick outsider candidate as a cost-free way of showing their displeasure to the occupant of Downing Street.

And so we get to see what a new-style “post-nasty party” Cameron Conservative government would actually do, through what Boris and the Conservative team are doing in City Hall. And make no mistake, Boris may be a one-man maverick, but for exactly that reason, those close to Cameron have foisted on him their top team of managers, to make sure that it is not just a goofy Boris show, but a proper Conservative government of London.

All of which makes it all the more significant that it’s not working out well.

This week Boris’ “First Deputy Mayor” left the team, the third senior figure, and second Deputy Mayor, to leave that team in some disarray (there have also been one or two more routine departures).

Applying the Lady Bracknell test, this is really start to get pretty embarrassing. You cannot continue to lose one senior figure a month, and remain credible for very long.

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The German communications agency Euro-Informationen has come up with a neat way of making the point that together European countries can form a bloc with enough clout on the world stage to rival the USA and China.

If the EU were a country, it would be well out in the lead in the table of gold medals at the Olympics: at the time of writing having 51 golds, compared to 35 for China in 2nd place and 19 for the USA in 3rd place.

Of course the EU isn’t a country and in many ways this is just a piece of fun.  

But their table makes very well the simple point of just influential a power bloc the EU can be on the world stage when it acts together rather than separately.