With Nick Clegg now a mere backbencher, his former staff appear to no longer feel the need to protect the Liberal Democrat from negative publicity. Today Clegg’s former campaign manager Ben Rathe has written a blog in which he reveals what happened when his search for a location for Clegg to give a speech — at the Liberal Democrat conference in 2013 — went spectacularly wrong:
‘It was the Liberal Democrat Conference 2013, and my role back then was planning all of the visits that Nick Clegg was doing over the course of the 5 days in Glasgow. This included finding somewhere suitable to announce a new 5p charge on plastic bags, which had the unusual honour of being a policy liked by both Liberal Democrat members and the Daily Mail.’
Rathe picked out a ‘lovely nature reserve just south of Glasgow called Cathkin Marsh’. As
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