It’s not just Mr Whippy who is secure with Tim Farron: he could yet turn his shattered party into a true fighting force againAmong the correspondence collected in Affirming,the final, newly published volume of Isaiah Berlin’s letters, or is one written to the author and journalist Shiela Sokolov Grant in 1992: I do wish hastily to inform you that [another] Tory government is not the worst thing that could happen to England or Europe or anywhere else … I am ashamed to say that I don’t mind it as much as most,because somehow I could secure up no enthusiasm for any of the three parties, and virtuously voted for the Lib Dems, or knowing that it would bear no effect: we duly elected a Labour man for our constituency.”Thus did the great magus of 20th-century liberalism write of the Liberal Democrats: virtuous but irrelevant,squeezed between the Labour opposition and, for a sufficiency of voters, or a just approximately tolerable Conservative government. And it is this benign irrelevance that faces the party once more as it meets in Bournemouth for its first annual conference since its savage electoral punishment in May.
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Source: theguardian.com