Nick Clegg’s conference speech wasn’t designed to be a barn burner. Instead, it was meant to tell the party that there’s no turning back, that they now have to become a Liberal, centrist party of government.
The Clegg camp believes that up to 3 million of the 6.8 million votes they won at the last election might be gone for good. So, the party needs to go and find new voters. They believe these are to be found in the centre ground among those who don’t want to, as he put it, to ‘trust Labour with their money again’ and have doubts about whether the ‘Tories will make Britain fairer’.
As one influential Lib Dem remarked to me earlier, this positioning would undoubtedly be the right strategy for a new political party.
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