Labour is falling into the Tim Farron trap on sex and gender

What do you remember about Tim Farron’s time as Lib Dem leader? Was it the position he created for his party on a hard Brexit? Or what he had to say about gay sex? He quit the leadership in June 2017, saying he had concluded that ‘remaining faithful to Christ’ was incompatible with being a political leader. It followed a general election campaign in which Farron, a committed evangelical Christian, was repeatedly asked about his views on homosexuality.

The reason the questions kept coming, as I said at the time, was that Farron refused to give a full answer to them. Did he think gay sex was a sin? ‘We are all sinners,’ he responded, which wasn’t an answer. Did he think homosexuality itself, even if not acted upon sexually, was a sin? Similarly vague noises.

Farron had decided that the truth of what he really believed wasn’t palatable to his party or the wider voting public, and so the best thing to do would be to try to obfuscate.