Abortion, gay rights and how the Lib Dem leader I once respected sold his soul

WE ALL know the apocryphal story of the MP who pushes out his chest and tells a large crowd: ‘ These are my principles and if you don’t like ’em . . .’ — at which point, the crowd starts heckling.

Speedily altering tack, the MP continues: ‘. . . and if you don’t like ’em, I can change ’em for other principles.’

Normally, this would be seen as a sceptical (if horribly true) observation about the elasticity of our politicians. They’d sell their souls to get elected, huh? But in the case of Tim Farron, it is more serious than that. Selling his soul may be precisely what it feels like to the Liberal Democrats’ pinkfaced young leader.

This is his first general election in charge and, poor man, he is making a hash of it.

Naive

He has failed to establish impetus in the opinion polls. He has been abused in the streets, with questions about his patriotism. And he has gained little broadcasting airtime, at least on issues he wants to discuss.

But none of those things matters as much as the fact that Mr Farron, a fervent churchgoer, has felt it necessary to recant on two big areas of conscience politics: gay rights and abortion. He used to be critical of both. Now, in the dirty way of modern politics, he has done a volte

face and ‘changed his mind’. Since scraping into Parliament in 2005, when he snatched rural Cumbria’s Westmorland and Lonsdale from the Tories by 267 votes, Mr Farron had developed a reputation as a straight-talking Lancastrian who might not agree with you on everything, but would at least tell you what he thought.

In 2008, he quit his party’s frontbench because he had doubts about Nick Clegg’s virulently pro-EU views.

When the Lib Dems went into coalition government, Mr Farron retained his self-respect by remaining a backbencher.

His Cumbrian constituents rather admired him for all that. At the 2015 election, he won his seat by a majority of 8,949.

Some commentators dismissed him as laughably naive. They patronised him for being a provincial eeh-bah-gum who projected no more gravitas than a Boy Scout leader. But some of us warmed to him.

I thought him a blessed relief from the metropolitan, opportunistic Clegg, and I liked the fact he was an out-and-proud churchgoer, Christianity being the real ‘love that dare not speak its name’ in today’s Leftwing politics. Good on him for being honest, I thought.

Sadly, that honesty has not survived the soul- sapping pressures of a general election campaign. With the Lib Dems panicking at their stagnant opinion poll ratings, Mr Farron has just done the second of two startling flip-flops on what were thought to be strongly held personal beliefs.

First, he was said, as a Bible fundamentalist, to regard gay sex as sinful — but when he saw the damage this was doing him with younger and with gay voters, he caved in to pressure from party managers and decided it wasn’t sinful at all.

Yesterday, he reversed away from his stated belief that abortion, as he once told the Salvation Army War Cry newspaper, was ‘wrong at any time’.

Opponents of the Lib Dems were trying to make hay with that old story, so the Lib Dems threw their leader’s beliefs under the battle bus and said he had changed his mind.

‘Tim has made very clear today that he is pro- choice and that Lib Dem policy is about maintaining the law to give women the right to choose,’ Lib Dem spokesman Sir Ed Davey told Good Morning Britain viewers.

Were we talking about policy on, say, tax rates or education, it might not matter. Politicians must be allowed to change their minds if they think the facts have changed.

But these two issues — gay sex and abortion — were on the personal judgment side of political debate. Rather than find a way to defend his right to dissent from Left- wing orthodoxy, Farron’s team simply blurted out that he’d changed his views.

One hesitates to compare little Farron to the great 17th- century Italian scientist Galileo Galilei, but there is a similarity.

At the height of his powers, Galileo was investigated by the Roman Catholic Church for holding heretical views about the orbit of the planets around the sun. Bullied by the Church’s Inquisition, which insisted everything revolved round the Earth, Galileo recanted. He lived for another 30 years and came bitterly to regret not having stood up for his theories, which turned out to be correct after all.

Is it not possible, in the treatment of the wretched Farron, to see echoes of Galileo’s forced recantation?

Indeed, we could see this case as an example of the nastiness of the modern priesthood of ‘liberals’ who are overbearingly intolerant.

Mr Farron’s problems began at the start of the election campaign when he appeared on Channel 4 News and was asked if he believed being gay to be a sin. He would not say.

Blustering

The interviewer barged all over Mr Farron’s private religious beliefs and a blustering, sweaty Farron could hardly have handled it worse. He could have said: ‘Mind your own business.’ But instead, he wriggled, and we all knew why: he was greedy for votes. The dishonesty was palpable.

The same would seem to be the case with his response to abortion. You do not have to be a practising Christian to see both sides of the abortion argument. The right of women to choose is one side of that.

On the other is the psychological and physical pain abortion causes, and the ever- improving ability of doctors to keep foetuses alive. To acknowledge both sides of this difficult matter would, surely, be the ‘liberal’ position.

Yet the Lib Dems have lost sight of the meaning of tolerance. They wag their fingers and insist on one view prevailing. Mr Farron has been taken prisoner by that hectoring tendency, and it is no surprise he has often looked so unhappy during this campaign. I feel sorry for him, yet I can no longer respect him.

Tragedy

One wonders what his constituents think. If local soundings are to be believed, he could lose his seat to the Tories. Cumbrians have little in common with the sexualpolitical obsessions of the sort of South London Lib Dems who are wrenching Mr Farron away from his roots.

Similarly, what do Lib Dem voters in places such as the West Country, Wales and East Anglia think? These are areas where the Liberal Party had a presence before it merged with the Social Democrats in the Eighties to form the party today known as the Lib Dems. The intolerance was a virus imported with the SDP.

Tim Farron’s tragedy is twofold. First, there is the political strategy decision he took, under pressure from metropolitan elements in his party, to push the Lib Dems as the main anti-Brexiteers — the only party calling for a re-run of last year’s EU referendum.

That suited ex-leader Nick Clegg, a Europhile zealot who may still dream of us rejoining the EU, so that he can become a Brussels Commissioner.

It also suited vain old Vince Cable, who is desperate to be re- elected by the Remainleaning voters of Twickenham.

But surveys suggest it has limited the Lib Dems to a shrivelling pond of voters. Worst, it was not true to Farron himself.

And here lies the second part of his tragedy. If, as looks likely, he has forsaken his beliefs — ‘recanted’, to use the Galileo term — for no purpose and the Lib Dems remain a pathetically small rump in the Commons, he’ll have sold his soul for nothing. His fellow churchgoers will forgive him. But will he ever forgive himself?