On Monday, I tracked down my father to his hotel in Liverpool. He was there for the Liberal Democrat conference.
On Monday, I tracked down my father to his hotel in Liverpool. He was there for the Liberal Democrat conference. He has attended every single one of these since 1953, when he represented the Cambridge University Liberal Club and made a fiery speech about how the Liberals should be more enthusiastic about Europe. So he has spent an entire year of his life at these occasions — surely a record. In the year of his first conference, which was held at Ilfracombe, the party stood at 3 per cent in the opinion polls. Its leader was Clement Davies who, even at the time, no one had heard of. ‘We did nearly die,’ my father said. Today, the party is in government. Even my father, who is 79, is too young to remember it holding power in peacetime. I asked the usual journalist’s ‘How do you feel?’ question. He tried to deflect me with a disquisition on the complexities of the coalition, but did eventually admit that this was ‘the most exciting moment’ for the party that he could remember. This surprised me a little. No one spends 60 years in the Liberal party if he thinks power is what matters most, and I thought my father might be worried by the compromises being made. Not at all. This is better than the time of the SPD-Liberal Alliance, said my father, because then there was the foolish illusion that they could actually form the government. Today, the position is more modest but more real. Nick Clegg had prepared admirably for a hung Parliament, and now here he was, winning ovations, and looking ‘shiny and blooming’. There were some worries, but ‘it is very unlikely now that we shall sink back into insignificance’.
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