Tim Farron, the Lib Dem president and the favourite to succeed Nick Clegg as leader, charmed activists at the Times’s lunchtime fringe today. With his declaration that “our pitch for being in government again shouldn’t be negative” (a rebuke to the leadership’s strategy), and his call for an “active, ambitious” state to protect citizens from the vagaries of globalisation , he succeeded in lifting delegates’ spirits.
The most politically notable moment came when he was asked about Ed Miliband. In response to health minister Norman Lamb’s comment that he couldn’t see Miliband “as a prime minister”, he warned the Lib Dems not to “personalise” the general election campaign. “Anyone can be prime ministerial once they’re prime minister,” he said. “I often think David Cameron isn’t prime ministerial, but he is prime minister.” He added, however, that “the problem for Labour is that people can’t place Ed Miliband in their minds behind the door of No.10.” He then went further and quipped that it was wrong to compare Miliband to Neil Kinnock because “it’s an unfair comparison to Kinnock”. Unlike the current incumbent, he said, the former Labour leader “took on his party and won”.
Farron’s criticism of Miliband contrasts with what he told me when I first interviewed him for the New Statesman in September 2013. Back then, he lavished praise on the Labour leader, declaring that “I really like Ed Miliband, so I don’t want to diss him. I don’t want join in with the Tories who compare him to Kinnock.” Now he argues that Miliband isn’t even worthy of this unflattering comparison.
Although it’s not surprising that the Lib Dem president should want to criticise the Labour leader at his party’s conference, it adds to the sense that Miliband’s stock has fallen in the last year. The irony, of course, is that Farron’s call for a more interventionist state puts the pair in the same ideological territory.
Elsewhere in the session, he argued that the Lib Dems “should have died in a ditch over tuition fees”, noting that “reputations take years to build and seconds to lose”. When asked whether he would stand in a future leadership contest, he wisely replied: “Anyone giving any headspace to anyone other than Nick being leader is letting the side down.”
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