Liberal Democrat conference will be the Nick Clegg show
Think you’ve seen a lot of Nick Clegg recently? There’s more to come. Tomorrow he’ll take a Q and A session with students and a round table meeting in the morning with teenagers who’ve just got their GCSE results. If you’re on the Lib Dem membership lists you’re going to get a lot more than that.
The party is planning to turn round flagging morale in some parts of the ranks with more leader contact – blogs, online chat etc. MPs are getting “catch-up” calls more frequently. And at the conference itself next month there will be Nick Clegg on the menu every day he’s there.
He’ll address a rally on the Saturday, do a Q and A session with members on the Sunday and deliver his speech on the Monday before flying off to New York to address the United Nations on the Tuesday.
Party strategists say the conference will also give the party an opportunity to celebrate their arrival in office – not something you will have seen a lot of in the Lib Dem ranks.
It’s been a “big step” coming into office, one strategist says, and “a bit sudden,” but a lot of members take pride in the fact that their MPs are rising to the challenge.
The party bigwigs, of course, know that there are malcontents in the ranks who don’t think there’s much to celebrate, know too that the polls show them in the mid-teens (another one on the way tonight I hear that suggests that’s still the case and that Labour is neck and neck with the Tories thanks largely to shaving off Lib Dem support).
But they maintain that they are the minority, just as they were when the party first plunged into coalition on the night of 11 May.
By the way, Nick Clegg wrongly said in a BBC interview today that Charles Kennedy voted against the coalition deal in the gathering of MPs that night. Mr Kennedy did say he couldn’t support the coalition at that meeting but I am told he abstained.
Something like four other Lib Dem MPs abstained though I’m still not clear who they all were and whether they were simply absent, conveniently absent, hiding in a cupboard or menacingly present and silent.