Brighton photo diary, Day 3

One of the things non-party members (who usually go by the name, ‘normal people’) are most curious about is what those of us who go actually do at a Lib Dem party conference.

Usually it’s a heady mix of full-on policy debates (so much more exciting if there’s a knife-edge vote which could defeat the leadership), fringe meetings (which the more ambitious MPs will attend half a dozen or more), and enjoying the company of folk you meet perhaps just once a year.

This year, there was an extra treat: a candidates’ hust for the three Lib Dems who are vying to be the party’s choice to take on Ken and Boris in the ’08 London mayoral election.

In a jam-packed lecture theatre at lunch-time today, Chamali Fernando, Fiyaz Mughal and Brian Paddick (in order of appearance) strutted their funky stuff, giving a 5-minute speech, before being quizzed by chair, Susan Kramer, herself an erstwhile Lib Dem mayoral candidate back in 2000.

Chamali fired off an absolutely cracking speech, fizzing with dynamic vigour; Fiyaz displayed an easy and commanding grasp of policies, communicated with real confidence; while Brian brimmed over with liberal camaraderie and humour, wooing an audience more than willing to be wooed with a beguiling mix of charm and calm (I guess he’s had to face tougher crowds in his life).

Like everyone else, I’m assuming Brian is a shoo-in for the Lib Dem nomination. In which case on the basis of today’s performance he will - win or lose (and he could win, you know) - do the party proud. But both Chamali and Fiyaz will do themselves and their future career prospects a power of good by continuing to make such a good contest of it.

I’m writing this on my way back from Brighton… work calls tomorrow, so this is my final photo diary direct from the front-line:

Brighton photo diary, Day 2

There’s a slightly odd mood surrounding the conference.

It’s a combination, I guess, of the ‘will he, won’t he’ general election speculation that Gordon Brown has allowed his spin-doctors to fuel, which inevitably makes for nervous excitement - only partly quelled by most people’s best guess that he won’t.

And also a sense of frustration, to which we Lib Dems have had to become accustomed, with the media for focusing on Ming Campbell’s leadership, and pretending that’s what the delegates are discussing.

The vast, vast majority are happy/reconciled to Ming leading the party through the next general election; a small minority, including a couple of our peers who should know much better, are happy to feed the media beast in return for having their tummies tickled.

Anyway, if you want to keep pace with what is actually happening in Brighton, check out the Lib Dem blogs Aggregator, and Lib Dem Voice.

Meanwhile, here are some pretty pictures from the conference hall, including yesterday's Q&A between Ming and Sandi Toksvig, and the speech by European Commission President, Jose Manuel Barroso:

Brighton Photo Diary, Day 1

Sorry, too busy to be erudite right now. Here, instead, are a couple of photos taken at last night’s conference rally, Human rights and civil liberties: home and abroad, where Ming made a good, passionate speech. (Even if no-one was too sure for a couple of seconds that he’d actually finished.)

If you’ve ever wondered what the view of conference is like from the back of the hall, here it is:



























And, then, last night I had the very great pleasure of hosting the second annual Lib Dem Blog of the Year awards, run by Lib Dem Voice in conjunction with the national party.

Some very good winners, and some just as good runners-up.

The overall Best Lib Dem blog trophy went to James Graham’s robust but eminently sane creation, Quaequam Blog!.

I snatched an interview with him at lunch-time, which you can watch here:

London Brighton calling

Time was, a trip to London on the Oxford Tube (actually a bus) meant 1.5 hours of seclusion from the internet, time to sit back and read, think or just zone out. No longer. It’s wifi-ed up, and I’m clinically incapable, it appears, of leaving my laptop be.

I’m en route to Brighton for the Lib Dem conference. Last year, I was a first-time rookie, and had carefully planned ahead exactly which conference debates and fringe meetings to attend. This year, I’m a two-time old-hander. Which means that I’m going to wing it, and see where I end up.

I may update this blog with my thoughts from Brighton. But chances are my time will be fully occupied by Liberal Democrat Voice, keeping pace both with the latest conference news and gossip, and the increasing number of submissions party members are sending in.

So, in the interim, are my two personal highs and lows from Brighton 2006, courtesy of YouTube:

Horrorgate, the aftermath

It’s been an odd seven days for the Lib Dems. This time last week, party activists were focused on the Harrogate spring conference, and the crunch Trident debate.

By last Saturday, the leadership could have been forgiven for breathing a sigh of relief: delegates voted - by a whisker - to support their favoured multilateralist stance, in part thanks to a passionate speech by Ming Campbell. Whichever side we were on, we could all be proud that, alone among the mainstream parties, the Lib Dems freely and openly debate and decide party policy at their conferences on a one-member-one-vote basis.

And then came Black Sunday, Horrorgate, when a ‘senior party source’ briefed the media that the Lib Dems favoured a coalition with Labour in the event of a Hung Parliament, and (as if that were not damaging enough) that we would cheerfully jettison proportional representation as a condition of any such deal. The leadership, in the person of Ed Davey, hastily rebutted this unauthorised briefing. But, by then, it was too late, and it’s a moot point which was more harmful: the original story, or the subsequent reports of chaos at the top of the party.

Of course, PR cock-ups happen in all parties, all organisations, all walks of life. But it’s incumbent on Lib Dems to be ultra-careful - so rarely do we attract the media spotlight outside of elections that, on those few occasions when we do find ourselves in its full glare, we simply cannot afford to be caught blinking and blustering.

Labour and the Tories get into scrapes all the time; but as they always dominate the headlines, by tomorrow the media will have moved on. If the only times the public notice Lib Dems is because we are dissolute or in disarray, it’s unlikely we will be perceived as an opposition-in-waiting. With luck, today’s reported resignation of the Lib Dems’ head of media, Mark Littlewood, may perhaps allow the party to draw a line under this unfortunate episode.

But, tempting as it is to scapegoat a feral press officer, the lessons from the last week need also to be learned by those higher up. It was not Mr Littlewood who first started speculating about the possibility of a Hung Parliament: it was Sir Menzies in his pre-conference interview with The Times’s Peter Riddell.

And it was not Mr Littlewood’s speech which clumsily set out five tests for Labour’s Gordon Brown to prove his prime ministerial worthiness, but scornfully dismissed David Cameron’s Tories in just three words. The media can hardly be blamed for inferring that equidistance is no longer the cri de coueur of the Lib Dems. That this seemed to take the party leadership by surprise is not to their credit.

It is also bad politics: as potential king-makers, it’s extra-important the party should keep, and should appear to be keeping, its options open. Let’s remember that in Saturday’s Trident debate Sir Menzies urged the party not to commit Britain to unilateral disarmament: to do so, delegates were warned, would undermine this country’s negotiating position. I agree. Real brinksmanship requires studied neutrality.

I have largely exculpated the media of blame for the hole the Lib Dems dug ourselves last Sunday. But this debacle highlights how good political reporting has been sacrificed at the altar of fast political reporting. Once upon a time, a politician made a speech, and it was reported verbatim. Thankfully those times are long gone. This gave way to the reporting of speeches accompanied by some contextual analysis. Then, with the pressure of the rolling news agenda, copy was distributed to the media in advance of a speech. And now, not only are speeches distributed in advance, but the media allows itself to be briefed on what are the key passages, and what the speaker really means by this or that sentence.

The result is that the media has given up listening to the content of speeches, or analysing them with detached objectivity: instead, all is viewed through the prism of the briefing. Journalists’ deadlines are more frenetic than ever: anything that isn’t encapsulated within the ‘Breaking News’ ticker-tape is old news. Being first matters more than being right.

Sunday’s debacle was wholly avoidable; that it wasn’t avoided is the Lib Dems’ fault, and our problem. But it also says much about today’s political climate - the interaction of journalists, media officers and politicians - that what controversy there was at conference centred not on the policies passed, but rather on a disputed behind-the-scenes briefing about a speech.

Neologisms revisited

As the hunt goes on to discover the identity of the senior party official who issued the unauthorised briefing suggesting Ming Campbell’s spring conference speech was the precursor to coalition talks with Labour, can I be the first person to label this episode ‘Harrogategate’?

With you in spirit

So this is where I was standing during the crucial Trident debate at the Lib Dems’ spring conference in Harrogate… Bruges.

Deliberately out of e-mail and phone contact for a long week-end, I didn’t discover the actual result of the debate til I returned home early Monday morning.

But I knew ‘the leadership’ hadn’t been defeated. How?

Because Trident was discussed on the BBC's Sunday AM newspaper round-up which I caught a few minutes of on satellite telly - and there was no mention of the Lib Dems. And we know that journos find debates and policies dull, but personalities and splits endlessly, pointlessly fascinating.

On a lighter note, here’s a rather more attractive pic from Belgium. Not too sure what folk would have been up to in Harrogate when I snapped this. But the law of averages suggests the bar was doing a roaring trade.

The Economist's end-of-year report on Ming

This week’s Bagehot column in the Economist carries a pretty fair assessment of the Lib Dem position one year into the Ming dynasty:

Nobody can say that Sir Menzies Campbell has had an easy first year as leader of his party. As poisoned chalices go, the leadership of the Liberal Democrats 12 months ago resembled something rustled up by Lucrezia Borgia on one of her more vengeful days. Yet this weekend many of the Lib Dems gathering in Harrogate for their spring conference sense that they may be closer to real power than at any time in living memory.

It notes the well documented difficulties Ming encountered in his first few months:

• The high-profile so-called scandals which undermined the party’s credibility;
• His first few jittery performances at Prime Minister’s Questions;
• A disappointingly mixed set of local election results.

And then it contrasts this turmoil with the progress the party has made in the last six months:

Since late summer, however, things have slowly got better. Helped by the fact that nobody in his right mind could contemplate the purgatory of another leadership contest before the next election, the Lib Dems put on a decent show of unity at their party conference in September. They also managed to win some positive coverage for the “green-tax switch” that allowed them to drop a damaging commitment to raising the upper rate of income tax to 50% in favour of environment-friendly taxes. With parliament's return after the long recess, Sir Menzies no longer looked quite so out of his depth at PMQs.

Over the past few months he has also been lucky. There is now rather less interest in his shortcomings than in those of Gordon Brown, while Tony Blair's long goodbye has been dominated by foreign policy—in particular, by the attempts on both sides of the Atlantic to find a way out of the Iraq morass. That has played to Sir Menzies's strengths and reminded voters that the Lib Dems were the only major party to oppose the war.

In January, egged on by some of his colleagues, Sir Menzies took the risk of calling for British forces to quit Iraq by October. Although he earned some (deserved) criticism for advocating a timetable that owed more to electoral populism than to concern for Britain's responsibilities, it won headlines. When Mr Blair announced last week the first phase of a withdrawal of the army from Basra, Sir Menzies was able to claim, somewhat speciously, that even the government now accepted his argument that there was nothing left for British troops usefully to do in Iraq.

Crucially for Sir Menzies, his party's performance in the opinion polls has been resilient enough to prevent any panic in the ranks. Given Mr Cameron's grab for traditional Lib Dem voters on the environment, civil liberties and localism, the party's poll rating, hovering around 20%, has been impressive. Senior Lib Dems claim to be delighted that Mr Cameron has worked so hard to put climate change on the agenda. They point to polling data that suggests voters still think the Lib Dems are easily the greenest of the mainstream parties. The more salient environmental issues become, they argue, the better the Lib Dems should do. And, vitally, the topic provides an alternative to Iraq, which may well be stale by the next election.

A good write-up, and a nice way to start the Spring conference week-end - from which I, regrettably, will be absent. Hope all attendees have a happy Harrogate…

Make up your minds

Clearly posting that 'Cleggy's off to a flier' on Sunday inspired a few Huhne-iacs to get in on the act - as a result Nick and Chris have swapped places in the poll to decide who you think emerged from the Lib Dem conference with most credit.

Indeed, I think it's fair now to say that it's a two-horse race - and one which may just be a foretaste of the leadership battle to come in a few years' time.

This poll is going to be open for just a few more hours, before I open up a new one - which will be along the lines of who you think would be the best Labour leader from a Lib Dem perspective.

Tax cuts popular with Labour voters - shock, horror

At last week's Lib Dem conference - during the debate about whether or not the party should ditch its commitment to increasing the top rate of tax for the very wealthiest to 50% - the argument was made that the exisiting policy was simple to explain, and would prove crucial in helping to sway centre-left voters in key Labour marginals, where many of the Lib Dems' best electoral hopes lie.

I was intrigued, therefore, by this finding from the BBC's Daily Politics 'perception panel', which measured the public's response to Ming's conference speech (and with which I have only just caught up):

Unsurprisingly, taxation was a key theme, and we were interested in your responses to the following passage.

We Liberal Democrats are different. Here is exactly what we'll do.

We will cut national income tax for 28 million working people.

We'll abolish the 10 pence starting rate.

We'll cut the basic rate from 22 pence to 20.

We'll raise the top rate threshold from £38,000 to £50,000.

We'll take over two million of our lowest earners out of income tax altogether. More than two million people.

Think about it. Money back in the pockets of the poorest working families.

Sir Menzies' proposed reforms of the tax system got broad support from the Lib Dem voters among you - but got even greater approval from the Labour voters.