Liberal democrats

Jo Swinson had a terrible session on Question Time earlier in the election campaign, but tonight in her interview with Andrew Neil, she showed that it is possible for a leader who believes what they are saying to survive a very tough grilling with their dignity intact. She faced difficult questions on her party’s Brexit position, on her voting record in the Coalition government, and on what she would do if her party lost seats at this election, but managed to stick to her guns in a way that showed up Jeremy Corbyn for not doing so in his interview – and Boris Johnson for not having the guts to

Michael Heseltine visited the Tory stronghold of Beaconsfield last night to support the recently ousted Conservative, now independent candidate, Dominic Grieve. During the event, which also saw Remain rebels David Gauke and Anne Milton take to the stage, Lord Heseltine was asked his advice to long-standing Conservative voters in the upcoming general election. Heseltine told the audience: I am telling them to vote for what they believe and what the Conservative Party has stood for all my life and certainly their’s and put country first. And what I think that means in practical terms is they either vote for the defrocked Conservative candidates, of which we have three excellent examples

The Liberal Democrat leader had an awful time on Friday night’s Question Time special. The audience was, at best, uninterested in her pitch. A notable moment was when a Remain voter criticised the Lib Dems for their policy of revoking Article 50, calling it ‘undemocratic’. You can watch the clip below:

It had not occurred to me that the Lib Dems would ‘allow’ Boris Johnson to remain PM if he were to fail to win a majority but the Tories nonetheless were to emerge from the election with more MPs than any other party. I assumed Jo Swinson’s and her Lib Dem MPs’ savage criticism of Johnson and the Tories would lead the Lib Dem leader to swallow her pride at the last and eat the vitriol she has thrown at Corbyn. I have been taking it for granted she would find a way to agree some kind of arrangement with Remain parties and MPs, with Labour and the SNP, that

The Liberal Democrats may have brought confetti canons to their manifesto launch, but they have still struggled to get as much attention today as they hoped, given Boris Johnson’s loose lips on the National Insurance threshold cut. They are also – by leader Jo Swinson’s own admission – suffering a squeeze in the polls. The latest YouGov poll has the party on 15 per cent, trailing Labour which is on 30 per cent and the Tories on 42 per cent. Perhaps more worryingly, given the focus on Swinson herself, voters don’t seem to warm to her the more they find out about her. What’s going wrong? One of the main

Jo Swinson has branded accusations she fired stones at squirrels as ‘very fake news’. Screenshots of what appeared to be a Daily Mirror story have been widely circulated online. The article alleges that a private video of the Lib Dem leader has surfaced on Facebook, showing her pelting the furry mammals with pebbles using a slingshot. The Remain campaigner told LBC‘s Iain Dale she was becoming increasingly concerned about such viral stories: ‘They’re quite sophisticated in that people can believe them. I do think its worrying because it has echoes of what we’ve seen in other elections and particularly when you think about fake news and the technological possibility for deep fakes, where

In an astonishing interview on the Today programme this morning, Liberal Democrat leader Jo Swinson tried to explain why she was tabling an amendment which would force a referendum on any deal the government presents to the House of Commons on the grounds that we should ‘let the people decide’. She then asserted that the country had changed its mind since the 2016 referendum and now wanted to remain. It had to be pointed out to her that her party has, in fact, just adopted a policy of reversing Article 50 without a referendum – so much for letting the people decide. The truth is that like so many Remain

‘Why don’t you just join the Liberal Democrats?’ If I’ve heard that once in the past couple of years I’ve heard it a hundred times. In online posts beneath my Times column, in public debates or private conversations, the question is sometimes a genuinely puzzled enquiry but more often an implied: ‘What the hell are you doing posing as a Tory?’ It’s all about Brexit, of course: the questioner’s assumption being that, strip from a Conservative the ambition that Britain should leave the European Union, and there remains nothing important to distinguish him or her from a Liberal Democrat. The assumption is part of the poisonous modern heresy that leaving

Lib Dem conference in Bournemouth is proving to be a jolly affair so far. I’m writing this in the garden of the Highcliff hotel, looking out over the Channel that divides the UK from France and, perhaps one day, the European Union. It’s Brexit that’s making the Lib Dems happy as they bustle by. Parties are generally happy when they feel they have a clear line on big issues, and the Lib Dem line on Brexit is now crystal-clear: cancel it. Partly because they expect a big Labour shift towards a clear Remain position, the Lib Dems are now, in headline terms, committed to revoking the Article 50 notification and