Nicholas (nwhyte) wrote,
Nicholas
nwhyte

Party president - my (likely) vote for Tim Farron

Since Jennie, alas, seems not to have got sufficient nominations for the post of President of the Liberal Democrats, I can declare that I'm pretty sure I'll be voting for Tim Farron, MP for Westmorland and Lonsdale. I knew Tim back when we were both student Lib Dem politicos and he (utterly against the odds) got elected to the NUS National Executive in a straw poll of NUS Conference (the runner-up in that vote, Lorna Fitzsimons, has been and gone as a Labour MP in the years since). Tim was eloquent and fiery then, and as far as I can tell he remains eloquent and fiery now. People may object that he is using the presidency of the party as a step to greater prominence, but there is no harm in that if he will do the job right, of representing the membership as a whole internally, and I rather think he will.

I have nothing against the other candidate, Susan Kramer, except that I don't know her. I think she will suffer from being a metropolitan London candidate, even though she is no longer an MP while Tim is. (Looking at the map, Tim and I live almost exactly the same distance from London.) For what it's worth, I think her opening statement, warning against unspecified sources of division, is weaker than Tim's, where he promises to be a 'critical friend' of the coalition. And when Tim promises to 'be a distinctive voice' in his headline, nobody who knows him can doubt that he will deliver.
Tags: lib dems
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