At the conference’s opening rally in Bournemouth, Mr Farron said: “When the tectonic plates of politics move, they sometimes move immensely quickly – that is what is happening now”.
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“My job is to grow the party and be clear we are the one party who will stand up”.
IF there was a symbol of how far the Lib Dems have fallen in the last few months it was the image of the party’s new leader, Tim Farron, making his contribution to the “debate” on the Queen breaking Queen Victoria’s record as the longest-serving British monarch.
Asked about the possibility of Mr Corbyn apologising on behalf of the party for the Iraq war, he replied: “I don’t think we should apologise but that’s a matter for Mr Corbyn to decide, if he’s going to apologise”.
“I am his partner and no he doesn’t”, says Mr Standen’s other half Carol, clearly a little irritated at this line of questioning.
Mr Corbyn has committed Labour to campaign to stay in the European Union after initially giving mixed messages about his response to the referendum.
Clegg, who quit as Liberal Democrat leader after the party lost 49 of its 57 House of Commons seats in May’s general election, said the level of engagement in the referendum on Scottish independence – in which just under 85 percent of voters turned out – would not be repeated in a vote on the EU.
“Instead, something quite unexpected happened: person after person came up to me to say how sorry they were, how undeserved they felt the election result was, how unfairly they thought we’d been treated”.
He said: “I hope those in other parties who embrace the kind of liberalism we believe in will be willing to work with us across party boundaries in Parliament and outside it to assemble a progressive, modern challenge to the unimaginative Conservatism of this Government”. At the last election people didn’t identify with us, but we are already doing that with our new leader.
“I am nostalgic for my youth but I am not nostalgic for those Labour economic policies which created the space for Margaret Thatcher to win in the first place and which kept her in power for a decade”, he said.
The Lib Dems are hard to keep down and despite the lack of media interest in their gathering, the #LibDemFightback is clearly underway, at least in their psyche, if not elsewhere. Either the world has changed and he will surprise everyone by attracting votes of previously apathetic citizens or the Labour Party will once again lose in 2020.
A recent letter that defended Jeremy Corbyn from Tony Blair’s insults remarked that Lord Prescott said on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that politics is about the head and heart.
But Labour MPs are not going to defect.
Jeremy Corbyn has been invited to speak at Labour Friends of Israel’s reception at next week’s party conference in Brighton.
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“What I am trying to emphasise is we desperately need to fill this gap between a very right wing Conservative government and the Corbyns”.
