Lib Dem conference rallies are always a little like spending Christmas with a family you don’t know: quite baffling but rather endearing. There’s the uncle who tells the same jokes every year (Paddy Ashdown, telling the conference that he’d been asked in the street by a ‘little man’ whether he ‘used to be Paddy Ashdown’ – mercifully the members found it hilarious, again), some confusing singing (an award-winning a cappella group who kept the delegates giggling by singing ‘stuck in the middle’), a bit of sweariness (Ashdown, again, claiming the Libs were ‘too nice’ and didn’t have any ‘proper shits’) and things that just don’t make sense unless you’re part of that family (a Lib Dem activist on stage telling the audience that she was ‘starstruck to go campaigning with Baroness Ludford’).
But alongside Ashdown firing up the membership with talk of the nasty Tories and the need to walk as though into gunfire and so on and so forth, there was also a surprisingly energetic rally speech from Nick Clegg, who unlike the other two Westminster party leaders doesn’t appear at all tired after the referendum.
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