He’s resilient as a scoutmaster erecting tents in torrential rain
watches tanned, Tintin-quiffed Tim Farron on the BBC sofa
WITH his party’s poll ratings tanking at something like 8 per cent, Lib Dem leader Tim Farron jutted his jaw at ill fortune yesterday morning. He drew the only conclusion a politician possibly can in such dreadful circumstances. ‘We are,’ he averred, ‘in a very, very good place.’ I loved that double ‘very’.
Do you think General Gordon said something similar before being hacked down in Khartoum in 1885? It’s all going swimmingly, chaps. Oh, hello, there. Who’s that white-robed chap pointing his scimitar at me?
Mr Farron, tanned and tieless on BBC1’s Andrew Marr Show with a little blond daub in the front of his Tintin quiff, declared that his party was the only answer to the current Conservative supremacy.
As he spoke, his party faithful were hobbling down to Brighton for their autumn conference – more walking sticks than in a box of Twiglets. Zesty, youthful, modern: these were not quite the words. Friends, I have seen the future – and it doesn’t look a bit like this lot.
When you arrive at Lib Dem conferences there are always activists on the pavement handing out fliers to fringe meetings about trans-sexuality, the environment, veganism and so forth.
If local hip-replacement surgeons and hearing-aid fitters got down there with their business cards they might fill their order books for months.
And yet Mr Farron, leaning forward to show how immersed he was in the task, insisted that it was the Lib Dems, oh yes, who would ‘build a progressive momentum’. Labour were goners, he argued. They hadn’t a hope!
Jeremy Corbyn with his brigades of revolutionaries was a fading proposition, we were told. It would fall to the yellow perils, the dotty old Lib Dems (currently down to just eight members in the House of Commons, one of whom is Nick Clegg and at least three of whom are certifiably useless) to lead the People of Israel to freedom.
Something like that, anyway. The Marr programme was at its very worst, moulding the entire show into some thesis about ‘the death of liberalism’. The lazy, unspoken bias in this was outrageous.
Andrew Marr conceded that the word ‘liberal’ was attractive, ie a good thing.
Yet he projected the theory that, with Brexit looming and with Theresa May having become prime minister, we were not in ‘a post-liberal world’. Ergo, Brexit and May were anti-liberal and a bad thing.
The BBC is so urban-Leftist, it probably did not even notice this casual prejudice.
But this ‘liberalism is finished’ idea really won’t wash. First, the Brexit vote (supported by 17.4million voters) was a tremendously liberating moment.
It got us out of a stinkingly protectionist union and means we will now revert to being a sovereign democracy rather than being bossed about by unelected commissioners in Brussels.
We will have a better chance to do free trade with African and Antipodean countries. Is that not liberal?
Is plain-born Mrs May, with her meritocratic ideas, somehow less liberal than Etonian Mr Cameron?
ArE grammar schools not superbly liberal, given their ability to smash class barriers? Marr was using ‘liberal’ as a synonym for that old Mitford sisters code ‘PLU’ (People Like Us).
Mr Farron wanted another referendum on our EU membership. ‘We trusted the people on departure, we should now trust them on destination,’ he said, looking pleased with this slippery soundbite. Marr asked if the Lib Dems would co-operate with other opposition parties to ensure that, for instance, there would be only one non-Tory candidate in the Witney by-election. Mr Farron wafted aside that idea.
In some ways you had to admire the optimism with which Mr Farron, so prettily husky and earnest, presented his case.
He shows the gallant resilience of a scoutmaster erecting tents despite a weather forecast of gales and torrential rain.
There ‘is every sign’, he said, that he and his Lib Dems would in future form the ‘positive, progressive, moderate opposition’.
I don’t suppose he believes that for a minute.