Ad Lib: there are mistakes here, but it's a good effort

I've been reading the Party's Ad Lib magazine, the successor to Lib Dem News. Generally, I liked it. I do have some fairly major quibbles, but for a debut issue, looking for new subscribers, I thought it was a good effort. For all Liberator wants  political analysis, that's not what Ad Lib is for. It's not going to be pulling the Party to bits and espousing all manner of conspiracy theories and if it tried, Liberator would be the first to complain that it wasn't doing it properly and was trying to throw us off the scent of the real conspiracies. Ad Lib is there to give insight into how the Party works and what's going on behind the scenes.

Some folk had expected the magazine to be A4 sized. That was never going to happen purely because of postal costs. A4 would be classed as large. What we do have is a glossy, A5 40 page production which, handily, fits in my handbag.

In terms of content, you are never going to top Shirley Williams. Ok, then, you might, with Paddy, but I am sure he will be using the pages of future editions to motivate us for the election campaigns ahead. The interview with Shirley saddens me only because the events of which she speaks took place nearly 32 years ago, which makes me very old. My 13 year old self was very excited by the launch of the SDP and their rolling conferences and interviews on trains seemed innovative and not just a way to save money. Shirley talks about the trauma in the Labour Party at that  time. I think there is just about enough historical context  there given that many people won't remember the events.

The interview with Nick Clegg has a clear agenda - to show how the Liberal Democrats are making the difference in Government. There's a handy little box showing you the ideas he's implemented and silly Tory ideas he has blocked. What annoys me about the feature is that in the 8 photos surrounding the article, none show any engagement with women and few have any women in them at all. The front cover of Ad Lib has two blokes in suits as its main photo. This is not the modern, vibrant image we want to project as a party.

I agree with Jennie's analysis of the content, too. Men tend to get to write about things like the EU Budget, the Obama campaign and to interview the important people. Women. on the other hand, get to write about Page 3 and women prisoners. Oh, and we get to do softer features like the very welcome profile of Nick Clegg's new special adviser. Shabnum Mustapha. The exception was Helen Duffett's interview with Julian Astle.I found the insight into the speechwriting process brilliant.I feel it suffered from being constrained by space. It would have been good to have had a bit about the actual content of the speech, to remind people. I would like to see what ended up on the cutting room floor. I'd quite happily publish Caron's Cut.

Going back to the Page 3 debate, I was annoyed that this was appallingly misrepresented as a campaign for a ban on the outdated and misogynist feature. The No More Page 3 campaign is about putting pressure on the Sun's editor to withdraw it voluntarily, a point that was not made at all. Using the word "ban" in any publication aimed at liberals is going to put people's backs up from the start. And please can we have "yes" and "no" in answer to the question and not "on the one hand" and "on the other" which sounds way too sappy.

I loved the report from the Obama campaign and the insight into the Dutch elections, too.

There has been some criticism of the recipe. All I'll say is this. Katy Riddle, in 10 years time, will probably have her own culinary empire. Her Feelgood Cookbook blog is jam packed full of enticing photographs, many of healthy food made to look like the opulent height of luxury and comfort. Ok, so the ham and coca cola is not every so healthy, but an army marches on its stomach and I could do with some ideas that are healthy and quick to prepare in future editions. Too many of us spend elections eating rubbish when we need to be fuelling ourselves properly. Anyway, in the future, when Katy's smiling face is beaming at us from the cookery shelves in bookshops, we'll remember fondly of the time she wrote for us. Of course, it is to be hoped that she'll be donating a good portion of her millions to the party....

In terms of layout, the size does mean that the font is not as large as some of our members might need, and the contrast could be greater, too. I wonder if it will be available for e-readers in the future.

I will definitely be subscribing to Ad Lib. I kept up my subscription to Lib Dem News right to the end even though I felt that it told me nothing I didn't already know. Ad Lib has the space for much more diverse content. The balance on style if not gender was just about right. I felt when I got to the end that I'd enjoyed it. There had been a little bit of humour and recreation as well as serious politics. I want to see more local Government, though. In fact, I want to see practical examples, from people affected, of lives being improved through the implementation of Lib Dem policies at local and national level.

A warning to Liberal Democrats though. Do be careful what you say on Twitter. Because you might end up on Page 37 without your knowledge. Ryan Coetzee, Nick Clegg's new head of strategy, was apparently blissfully unaware of his starring role until I told him last night on Twitter.

The team didn't have a long time to pull Ad Lib together but still managed to do an amazing job. Thanks to them.

And one more thing. I need a bird. It just doesn't feel right without   our Liberal Democrat logo on the front cover...

Let's unite behind Shirley Williams' NHS motion #ldconf

I adore Shirley Williams, always have, always will. She's one of my political heroines. The way she has fought for women's rights and helped emerging democracies to develop shows a truly liberal and compassionate spirit. So that's my declaration of interest out of the way. But I'm not alone. I'd say most of us in Gateshead this weekend feel the same way.

The future of the NHS is not something that you can pin to personalities. That's why I was not best chuffed when Nick Clegg said this afternoon that you were either on Shirley's side or Andy Burnham's. We are and always will be on the side of the patient. As a party our vision is for people centred public services, flexible enough to give each individual as close a fit to what is best for them as we can manage.

Nick was, however clumsily, alluding to Labour's shabby record on the NHS. He spoke about how the Coalition has put an end to the quarter of a billion quid of sweetheart deals Labour had done with the private sector. Labour didn't tackle the problems that there are within the NHS, where elderly people are often caught between an NHS and a local Council, neither of whom will take responsibility for giving them the care they need. They get called names, bed blockers, when in reality they are the victims of a system that fails them when they need it.

I know of cases where friends have been let down by failures of diagnosis and when those errors happen, the NHS is very slow to accept responsibility and in fact can turn pretty hostile in its defensiveness.

I have to say that by far the majority of health professionals I know are amazing. The nurse who comforts a patient Norovirus knowing that her presence in the room is a virtual certainty that she'll be suffering herself within hours. The physio whose patient hours of expert help give Stroke victims their lives back but those individual efforts can be compromised by the way the service is organised.

There needs to be reform and in some areas a fairly major cultural shift.

I remain far from convinced that the Health and Social Care Bill will deal efffectively with all the challenes and shortcomings within the NHS. It will not, however, mean a privatisation. The NHS will be sticking to its founding principles of being free at the point of need. I am concerned about the cost of the change and worry that the removal of tiers of management will not save money for patient care. I suspect a lucrative market in consultancy services to GP consortia will develop.

There has been a whole load of scaremongering about the effects of the Bill. I don't have an ideological opposition to private companies providing some services, and I certainly don't object to voluntary sector specialists being involved if they can provide a more tailored service.

I've been talking to lots of people about this around the Conferene and even some of those who can be relied upon to be very pro the Coalition have worries about it. This Bill is way out of our comfort zone, and rightly so. It has, however, been substantially changed because of the work that our peers, led by Shirley Wiliams, have done.

Today Conference representatives chose to debate the motion that's become known as the Shirley Williams motion over the motion calling for the Bill to be dropped. How good is it that our party allows ordinary members the freedom to make these sorts of choices, by the way?

The proposers of that motion have to be very sensitive to the fact that more representatives gave the drop the bill motion their first preference. I would suggest that their tone should be respectful, understanding and persuasive.

Let's look at the options before Conference tomorrow. On one hand there's the emergency notion from the Lords team and others which says that the peers will only support the bill if the required changes are made in terms of the Competition Commission and Foundation Trusts. Or we hae the status quo which means that they'll be whipped to support it as is, without these changes. That's the reality of the situation.

Conference effectively made its choice on how it wanted to handle this today, albeit by the narrowest of margins, by choosing not to debate the withdrawal option.

The way I see it is that the Protecting the NHS motion is the better of the two options available. Voting against it will potentilly deprive a bill that will inevitably pass of some vital changes. It's not a choice I think many people would make with huge amounts of enthusiasm, but it's necessary.

Shirley Williams talks about barriers facing women in Politics and Business

On one of these election results programmes from 1979, Shirley Williams had to put up with the ignominy of being told she was "very pretty" by Sir Robin Day. I never heard him say the same thing to male politicians, funnily enough. Can you just imagine how Harriet Harman would have reacted? Shirley was very gracious at the time but I'm sure she must have inwardly raised her eyes to heaven as every woman involved in politics does frequently.

Yesterday, Shirley talked to the Guardian about the clubbish, boyish nature of politics and the barriers facing women in the business world. It's well worth a listen.

Nick could learn from Barack's State of the Union preparation

I spent some time yesterday evening geeking out on the White House website in advance of tonight's State of the Union address. This is the annual prestige occasion when the US President addresses both houses of Congress on where the nation is at, and on his priorities for the coming year.

The coverage on the White House website is something that I think Nick Clegg could learn from in three particular ways:

• Telling people exactly what's going to happen and when. Videos outlining the traditions behind the State of the Union and the planned coverage and what will happen afterwards;
• Providing the facility for people to watch enhanced coverage on the web or their phone - with graphics illustrating the President's points as he makes them;
• An immediate web panel of senior advisers afterwards taking questions via Twitter.

Obama is clearly using the mechanisms of Government to their best advantage there. Clegg's opportunities in this country are yet to be maximised, I think.

However, we can't use Government to publicise the one annual occasion when all eyes are on him - his Autumn Conference speech.

Maybe we should be looking at what lessons we could learn from the great campaigning minds around Obama. I can see some You Tube videos with people anticipating the speech and what could be in it. Not difficult to collect in these days of smartphones shooting HD video.

I don't know if we could do the live web streaming. My guess is not, but we should have video with graphics for people to watch later.

And, finally, a webchat with Farron, Shirley and Paddy immediately afterwards.

The follow up actually continues all week, with Obama doing a hangout on Google Plus on Monday.

What do you think? When Nick has something to really say, we should look at how we can enhance the follow up. Have a closer look at how the Obama team does it. If nothing else, it'll feel a bit like an episode of the West Wing.

Liberal Democrats stand up and are counted with Shirley Williams and Evan Harris on NHS #ldconf

I've written many times about how Shirley Williams is my political hero. In fact, we probably don't need the political in there. I have so much respect for the contribution she's made not just in this country, but internationally.  


I still have going round in my head a speech she made nearly 30 years ago, where she talked about how, sometimes, in order to advance your beliefs, you have to scale unscaleable heights. That was in the context of putting herself forward as Alliance candidate for the Crosby by-election. It's so true, and although I'm not anywhere near as good a mountaineer as Shirley, that philosophy has never left me.


Over six decades, Shirley has helped shape our nation's future. And she hasn't stopped yet. Today, in the debate on the NHS at Party Conference, she argued passionately against the worst of planned Coalition reforms.


Twitter was full of the persuasiveness and excellence of her speech was was extremely well received in the hall. I'm not at Conference, and I am, frankly, disgusted at the lack of coverage. I asked on Twitter if there were copies of her speech available. Chris Mills was sitting near her, so he went and asked for. Apparently there is no copy, because it was delivered off the cuff, from a few notes. She let him take photos of her notes on the understanding that they would be published and he very kindly sent them to Spidey and I so we could share them too.


He didn't have to do that - he could have just kept them to himself and published them when he got home so I really appreciate that. I'm also very grateful to Shirley for sharing something so personal. They show how clearly her mind works. My notes would have scribblings out everywhere and would be a complete and utter mess, and I would never be able to transform them into a coherent speech.


Here they are:

Her main points were concerns about the lack of accountability of the new GP consortia and the fact that the private sector would cherry pick the most profitable work and would have no interest in treating patients in the most need. Her speech was greeted with rapturous applause. I admire the way she's opposed Coalition policy on this in such a constructive way. She's made it clear that she supports the Coalition and respects the work of our ministers, but that this NHS re-organisation was not mentioned in the Coalition Agreement and our Parliamentarians should not consider themselves bound to support it. Sounds fair enough to me.


The amended motion passed, which I will reproduce below with all the amendments in the right place, unlike the Lib Dem website which has them all published separately, calls on Liberal Democrats in Parliament - Lords and Commons, to make a stack of amendments which would improve the Health Bill and protect patients from the greatest risks of private sector involvement. 


The movers of the motion knew that they had no chance of winning the vote and decided, sensibly, to go for the conciliatory approach and accept both amendments. The proof of the pudding, of course, is yet to come. Conference is in no mood to see this motion quietly filed away and forgotten about and will be expecting our ministers to take clear and measurable action to improve this bill. They will not get away with anything less and we will expect the Federal Executive and Policy Committees to proactively make sure that Conference's wishes are carried out.


Here is the motion in full:

Conference believes that the NHS is an integral part of a liberal society, reflecting the social solidarity of shared access to collective healthcare, and

a shared responsibility to use resources effectively to deliver better health.

Conference welcomes much of our Coalition Government's commitment to the founding principles of the NHS: available to all, free at the point of use, and based on need, not the ability to pay.

Conference welcomes the vision for the NHS set out in the Government's White Paper, Equity and Excellence: Liberating the NHS, which commits the Government to an NHS that:

i) Is genuinely centred on patients and carers.

ii) Achieves quality and outcomes that are among the best in the world.

iii) Refuses to tolerate unsafe and substandard care.

iv) Puts clinicians in the driving seat and sets hospitals and providers free to innovate, with stronger incentives to adopt best practice.

v) Is more transparent, with clearer accountabilities for quality and results.

vi) Is more efficient and dynamic, with a radically smaller national, regional and local bureaucracy.

vii) Gives citizens a greater say in how the NHS is run.

Conference particularly welcomes the proposals to introduce real democratic legitimacy and local accountability into the NHS for the first time in almost forty years by:

a) Extending the powers of local authorities to enable effective scrutiny of any provider of any taxpayer-funded health services.

b) Giving local authorities the role of leading on improving the strategic coordination of commissioning across the NHS, social care, and related childrens' and public health services through councillor-led Health and Wellbeing Boards.

c) Creating Health Watch to act as a local consumer champion for patients and to ensure that local patients are heard on a national level.

d) Returning public health duty to local government by ensuring that the majority of public health services will now be commissioned by local authorities from their ring-fenced public health budget.

Conference recognises however that all of the above policies and aspirations can be achieved
without adopting the damaging and unjustified market-based approach that is proposed.

Conference regrets that some of the proposed reforms have never been Liberal Democrat policy,
did not feature in our manifesto or in the agreed Coalition Programme, which instead called for an
end to large-scale top-down reorganisations.

Conference therefore calls on Liberal Democrats in Parliament to amend the Health Bill to provide
for:

I)              More democratically accountable commissioning.
II) A much greater degree of co-terminosity between local authorities and commissioning areas.
III) No decision about the spending of NHS funds to be made in private and without proper
consultation, as can take place by the proposed GP consortia.
IV) The complete ruling out of any competition based on price to prevent loss-leading corporate
providers under-cutting NHS tariffs, and to ensure that healthcare providers ‘compete’ on
quality of care.
V) New private providers to be allowed only where there is no risk of ‘cherry-picking’ which
would destabilise or undermine the existing NHS service relied upon for emergencies and
complex cases, and where the needs of equity, research and training are met.
VI) NHS commissioning being retained as a public function in full compliance with the Human
Rights Act and Freedom of Information laws, using the skills and experience of existing NHS
staff rather than the sub-contracting of commissioning to private companies.
VII) The continued separation of the commissioning and provision of services to prevent conflicts
of interests.
VIII) An NHS, responsive to patients’ needs, based on co-operation rather than competition, and
which promotes quality and equity not the market.

Conferences calls on:

1. The Government to uphold the NHS Constitution and publish an audit of how well organisations are living by its letter and spirit.

2. Liberal Democrats in local government to establish local Health and Wellbeing Boards and make progress developing the new collaborative ways of working necessary to provide joined-up services that are personalised and local.

3.  The government to seize fully the opportunity to reverse the scandalous lack of accountability
of publicly-funded local health services which has grown up under decades of Conservative
and Labour governments, by:

a)  ensuring full scrutiny, including the power to require attendance, by elected local
authorities of all organisations in the local health economy funded by public money,
including Foundation Trusts and any external support for commissioning consortia;
ensuring that all such organisations are subject to Freedom of Information requirements.
b)  ensuring Health and Wellbeing Boards (HWBs) are a strong voice for accountable local
people in setting the strategic direction for and co-ordinating provision of health and
social care services locally by containing substantial representation from elected local
councillors; and by requiring GP Commissioning Boards to construct their Annual Plans
in conjunction with the HWBs; to monitor their implementation at meetings with the HWBs not less than once each quarter; and to review the implementation of the AnnualvPlan with the HWBs at the end of the year prior to the construction of the Annual Plan forvthe forthcoming year.
c)  Ensuring commissioning of health services has some degree of accountability by
requiring about half of the members of the board of commissioning consortia, alongside GPs, to be local councillors appointed as non-executive directors.
d)  Offering additional freedoms only to Foundation Trusts that successfully engage substantial proportions of their local populations as active members.

Shirley Williams supports Liberal Democrat Trident call

Shirley Williams is my political hero. I had real goosebumps when during the Conference debate on the emergency motion on Trident when the chair asked our 79 year old peer to stand by.

When she took to the platform, she started by reminiscing on her own 1981 by-election win for the SDP in Crosby, paying tribute to all those who helped in her campaign.

She then went on to basically annihilate the position of the Tories on insisting that Trident is not subject to the scrutiny of the Strategic Defence Review. She made the point that Trident is essentially a cold war weapon, and last time she looked, she reckoned that the Cold War was over.

Shirley has more knowledge and understanding of US politics than most other people and went on to take apart the idea that not replacing Trident would damage the special relationship with the US. She asked if Liam Fox had noticed that George W Bush had gone, and that a new President, committed to disarmament had taken office. She said it would be ludicrous of us to move in the opposite direction to President Obama, taking on a new system committing us to nuclear weapon power for 40 years, when he's doing what he can to get rid of as many as possible. She argued that a better way forward would be to support him in his endeavours.

Conference supported the motion, pretty overwhelmingly, to ask our Ministers to continue to press for Trident to be included in the Strategic Defence Review.

I would like to see us adopt a policy of getting rid of nuclear weapons altogether but that wasn't on offer today.  Some might say that this motion was a large portion of fudge, rather than the unequivocal rejection of nuclear weapons that others wanted to discuss. There's plenty of time to have that sort of debate, though. We slated Labour in Government  for rushing to replace Trident.

I liked the fact that Julian Huppert, the new MP for Cambridge proposed the motion and mentioned his own opposition to nuclear weapons in principle in the process. There must somewhere be an issue I disagree with him on but I've yet to find it.

20 Years since the Berlin Wall came down? Really?

I think the resounding thing I feel from the 20th anniversary of the Berlin Wall coming down (as predicted by my friend, the author of Cicero's Songs, when I first knew him in 1985, by the way)is old.

Some of you may know that my husband is a few years older than me. What I studied in History at school had been Modern Studies for him. I kind of feel a bit like that with things like tonight's commemoration of an event which counts as History for my daughter. It surely can't possibly be two decades since we saw those huge, jubilant, crowds smash up the barrier that had brutally and ruthlessly divided a country, a city and many, many families and friends for 28 years.

We watched the events of 9th November 1989 unfold from our digs in a small Nottinghamshire village. We'd moved down only a few weeks before and it was a huge change for us. It was like moving to another planet for us. Everything was so different, the accents, the way of life, the roads were so much busier. For the first time in our lives, we were living away from the coast which was really hard for me at least, to get used to. It was quite a shock to our systems.

That modest change in our lives took quite a lot of adjustment, but it was nothing compared to the difference the tumultuous events in Berlin made both there and across Europe as the Iron Curtain was ripped down, melted and turned into coke cans. I know what we went through - what on earth it must have been like for the people in both East and West Germany I can barely imagine.

After the initial euphoria of the wall coming down came the sometimes painful and expensive process of reuniting Germany. There and across Eastern Europe, it came as a much bigger culture shock than we'd ever experienced for people who'd lived most or all of their lives under stifling Communist rule to become citizens in a democracy.

The officials of the state had to learn that they had to treat people with decency, fairness and respect and not just dictate to them as before.

In the aftermath of all of this, our own Shirley Williams set up something called Project Liberty, an organisation which helped train government officials in being accountable to parliament and the people instead of an all powerful Communist Party. She talks in her recently published autobiography, Climbing the Bookshelves (a book well worth a read if ever there was one) about how Project Liberty helped with the process of privatisation. Under the Communists everything was state owned and Project Liberty advised on the transition to private ownership and the importance of setting up appropriate safety nets for people. Under Communist rule, everyone had jobs, but that would not continue under the new capitalist economies so they had to set up a structure that helped those people. It's typical of Shirley to want to use her expertise in Government to help in this way to try to help build fair and open systems of Government and her involvement in this is one of the reasons she's my all-time political hero.

Those amazing events of 20 years ago led to huge change across all of Europe and gave hope that even huge totalitarian monolithic repressive regimes could come to an end.

That change means that the maps of Europe my daughter grows up with are so very different from those when I was her age. Then a huge swathe of Eastern Europe was coloured in pink with just four letters, USSR, on it. Where I grew up with West and East Germany, she only knows Germany.

It really doesn't seem like 20 years ago, though........

7 Reasons I joined the Lib Dems

Time for me to tackle the meme of the moment. You'll notice that I'm not conforming by waiting until Saturday to do it:-)

The backdrop to my political DNA is found in the Preamble to the Party's Constitution - the rest of the document is as dull as ditchwater, as constitutions are to most people, but the Preamble sets out our core values as Lib Dems - fairness, community, decentralisation and respect for people as individuals. And the thing is, these aren't just words to us - we know what they mean and we try to live them out whenever we are in power, and in our lives as well.

1. I watched Roots when I was about 8 and was appalled by the scenes of human beings treating other human beings so brutally. That was the start of my political awakening. The Party has such a long tradition of campaigning against injustice and abuse and unfairness that it was only natural that I should join.

2. Things like the closed shop, and people being abused for refusing to go on strike, used to really annoy me. The huge mass meetings of the 70s just seemed to me to be so undemocratic and intimidating. The Party was in favour of making unions more democratic and accountable to their members and also in giving employees a greater say in the running of the companies they worked for.

3. Bob Maclennan, the SDP MP for Caithness and Sutherland, was such a good, decent person and took time to thank me for the work I did on his campaign and to answer any questions I had and to involve me in the party, even though I couldn't vote for him at that time. As an aside to that, the people in the Liberals and SDP were all really lovely and welcoming. I made friends during the 1983 campaign when I was 15 that I kept in touch with for the rest of their lives.

4. Everybody's unique. Everybody is individual. They have their own feelings, opinions, and experiences. The Lib Dems get that. I remember being really turned off by the Labour Party at university - if you didn't believe in everything they did, you were seen as somehow a lesser class of person. We celebrate debate and diversity.

5. Not everybody has the same chances in life - we want a society where being poor, black, gay or female is not allowed to stop somebody from fulfilling their potential. That's why Nick Clegg is always talking about how angry he feels that someone in a rich part of Sheffield, where he's an MP, is likely to live decades longer than someone in a poor part.

6. We think the State is there to facilitate justice and fairness, and not to tell people how they should run every minute area of their lives. We won't ban or compel unless there is a very, very good reason. We view the restriction of individual liberty as extremely serious. I remember when I was pregnant, just after Labour came to power, listening to a Labour Minister being interviewed about "National Average Bedtimes." Why waste time on such frivolties when people are living in terrible poverty? This is why we are instinctively against such things as ID cards and CCTV being used to spy on people putting their bins out, and why we don't think the Police should be able to detain people for weeks without charge.

Shirley Williams is one of my absolute political idols and I totally admired her for being involved with Project Liberty in the 90s. It was an organisation which went into the emerging democracies in Eastern Europe and tried to help the Government organisations in them develop a culture of service, rather than one they had been used to, where they were all powerful and people just did what they were told.

7. At the 1997 election, I remember being upstairs watching the election results at the count in Chesterfield. I was alone in the room with Tony Benn, who didn't say a single word to me as he ate his white chocolate Magnum. Chesterfield Labour Party were never that nice to the Lib Dems, unsurprisingly because we kept beating them and showing them up for being incompetent bunch they were. I'm not sure they've improved that much since then, to be honest. But maybe Benn's silence was a good thing because I was practically crying with joy that we were going to get a Scottish Parliament.

It always seemed crazy to me that we didn't. We had a separate legal and education system. Why on earth was the centre of political power for those things in London? Independence never did it for me. I guess because I just thought that decisions should be made at the lowest sensible level.

The principle of decentralisation of power is and always has been a key part of Lib Dem philosophy. Lib Dems in Government are always looking to empower and to listen to local people and communities and that, to me, is a key part of what makes up a good Government.

So there are my 7 reasons as to why I not only joined, but have stayed involved for 25 years. They are why I've delivered leaflets in the rain, endured election campaigns where sleep is an optional extra if all the work is done, spent a small fortune on travelling to and from various elections and donating to campaigns and basically run my life round the party. I've had highs, the best of which was the win in Dunfermline in 2006, and lows - losing a Council by-election by 17 votes is no fun, believe me. I've made some lifelong, wonderful friends, though, and I couldn't imagine my life without the Lib Dems in it somewhere.

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Why I love Shirley Williams

Reasons too numerous for one blog posting, but specifically today because I've watched her being interviewed on the '79 election programme.

Can you just imagine what would happen to any interviewer today who said to Hazel Blears, or Harriet Harman that they were looking "very pretty" before they started the interview as Robin Day did to Shirley? It was really appalling, but she took it all in good spirit and very graciously thanked him for the compliment.

She was interviewed twice - once before the votes had even been verified so she didn't really know she'd lost, and once after her result had come through. She came across really well on both occasions, magnanimous in defeat to her Conservative opponent and speaking very warmly about her own team. She was also very politically astute about the reasons for her own defeat and very circumspect about the whole thing.

She got a few wee digs in, notably about the election of Mrs Thatcher not necessarily being a great development for women, but did so in a very engaging way and no doubt on very little sleep.

The interesting thing was that Norman St John Stevas, a Tory, being interviewed in the London studio, was full of praise for Shirley, saying she was one of the most honest and decent people in politics.

It was fascinating to see this 30 year old footage of Shirley. I wonder what would have happened if she had won her seat. She may well have joined the SDP, because she alone would probably not have been able to stem the Trot tide, but then would the Alliance have won Crosby without her? How important was Crosby in shaping the Alliance's fortunes? But then if she'd been defeated in 1983, might she have been the winning candidate in Chesterfield in 1984 for the Alliance? It's an interesting thought.

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