Not So Liberal After All..?

Indeed, it’s been pretty disgusting all round. He isn’t that old for a politician and the ageist attitude does nothing to boost the reputation of a party that should be offering a much stronger opposition than the Tories. To be honest he’s not the candidate I would have chosen on the first ballot as he’s not the most sparkling personality I’ve ever seen and, unfortunately, choosing someone camera unfriendly is a mistake but a party should stand in solidarity whith their choice.

Hi Rob

I can understand your frustration (and morale in the party is pretty low) but you’re aiming at the wrong target. Of course there were people sniping at Ming – but I’ve been a Lib Dem member since I was a teenager, and there’s never been a single day when *someone’s* not been critical of whoever the leader is at the time. It’s just not true that there was a big plot to get rid of him in the party.

The reason the media are all trying to say there is (but without being able to point to anyone or any evidence, you notice) is that this is the first example of a leader being hounded from office entirely by the press, not their party. I read the Independent yesterday, which had a pretentious ‘Merciless’ full-page headline over a picture of Ming, and claimed to offer details of how the party had removed him inside; well, it gave no such details. They were just trying to cover their backs, because I read the very same paper every day at Lib Dem Conference last month, and every day the Independent had a cartoon of Ming on a zimmer frame, on a life-support machine, as a skeleton…

Ming’s main leader’s speech to our conference went down brilliantly: but every press report ignored what he said, and just talked about the ‘questions over his leadership’. Questions that almost no-one actually at the conference was asking except journalists – who, in over 70 interviews with Ming that week, asked about his age in *every single one*.

Or, to quote Ming himself yesterday on being “irritated and frustrated” at his media coverage: “Irritated because of the quite extraordinary concentration of trivia which seem to surround leadership – people write articles on what kind of socks I wear.” And on ‘plotters’ in the party: “I had no sense that there were people wanting to move against me. If I had decided to go on and anyone had tried to move against me then I would have dealt with them pretty sharply. This was my decision. I took this decision.”

Excuse the rant, but I’m quite p***ed off, and the almost unanimous media attitude of holding up shocked mittens and wondering who could have turned Ming out turns my stomach.

Hey Alex! Interesting to hear what’s going on at grass-roots there. Indeed I have been vaguely aware that the press generally has been using it as a fairly easy stick to beat him with which makes it more than doubly unfair. (Not just the Indie after all.)

That said, there were also quotes from Li Dem members on some website which were quite scathing and, I felt, unsupportive, which would also have added some fuel to the fire. They may have been prompted by concerns that the image being portrayed in the press was damaging (as it was) but even so.

Mr Hughes didn’t exactly help, I felt, either. I saw his comment on the leader having to “do better” and my jaw dropped. I’m sure it was meant well and again was prompted by the idiot press coverage, but it struck me at the time as a bit of an isolating comment.

As I say, we shall see.