The Future's Orange, Not Bright for Kennedy
Guido does not pretend to understand the LibDems or their factions and ways. But it seems that the relatively right-wing Orange-booker Mark Oaten spammed all and sundry yesterday in an incongruous email that emphasised his liberal left-wing credentials to activists. Old Menzies Campbell is putting himself about as well. Mutterings abound that Cameron's Conservatives are going to sweep up middle-class centrist voters who have never really felt comfortable with the leftie beardie wing of the LibDems. Looks like we have the prospect of another dead Kennedy.Guido asked this before about Malcolm Rifkind: What is the question that the LibDems could ask to which the answer is Menzies Campbell?
16 comments:
No opposition role for Kennedy now Cameron is here (was there anyway?). The BNP has more chance!
http://awnty.blogspot.com
I think the problem is that the LibDems have different incompatible policies for the three different regions: South West, Northern Cities and Scotland. That they have managed to do reasonably well is due to them having a mumbling, bumbling national leader who cannot articulate any policies, and local 'interpreters' for each constituency. As long as they do not have a truly national set of policies they will be a HaHa party and require a HaHa leader. I think Kennedy is perfect in this respect. The last thing they need is someone brushing away the cobwebs.
The drunken party stumbling between policies back and forth. I rather hope Charles has gone back to drinking heavy cause then they might use my song 'Whisky & Westminster' about his downfall.
In response to the question that you posed how about;
If you were to choose a Lib-Dem who was a pompous Scot's arse who can't spell 'Ming' properly, who would have bitten Blair's arm off to be in a possible coalition '97 government and has more fake moral indignation than a TV evangelist. Then who would it be?
The question to which the answer is Campbell is 'What is the most traitorous, treacherous and evil clan in Scottish history?'
cf 'Glencoe, Massacre of'. They also fought for the Hanovarians at Culloden, the b*st*rds. Before any Englishman says, as Englishmen do about anything that happened earlier than last week, 'But that's ancient history', I refer you to the current Prime Minister's former spin doctor, a not untypical representive of his foul clan ...
... all this sounds very much like 'sins of the fathers' territory. How does fergusmacd feel about modern-day Germans/Austrians, as a matter of interest?
- I am of course not a Campbell ;)
The Germans and Austrians are not in my country. Over the centuries, they have been sometimes allies, and sometimes foes (my grandfather and his brothers fought them, my father and his brothers fought them, but my wife is half Swedish and half German, so I clearly do not bear a grudge). The Campbells on the other hand have been the constant enemies of decent people for a thousand years, and my comment about Alistair of that ilk shows that their essential character has not changed. By decent people I mean faithful Scotsmen, including Macdonalds, Camerons, Robertsons, Donnachies, Macleans .....
Menzies Campbell? He is an old fool with no more love for the general public as we have for him. The fact that the great eejits name is even coming up shows us all just how desperate the Social... oh no sorry, LIBERAL Democrats are in the face of a revitalised Conservative party.
Is it not curious that the point where they have moved from being a Fringe group of hypocrites and Kn*bs with no policies to a supposed coalition for the Liberal Upper class, is the point in time that the Tory party was pretty much in the worst position it has had the misfortune to find itself in since 1906?
And that even then they couldn’t actually capitalise as (A) They don’t actually stand for anything except for disagreeing with everything everyone else ever says,
and (B) A significant part of their party election funds went on the campaign of trying to "Decapitate" the Tory party leadership at the 2005 polls and as they only got ONE head I would suspect that there will be certain people unwilling to reinvest in such an enterprise. The fact that their antics actually provoked the Tory vote numbers to go up in a large portion of these seats will surely add to this and perhaps make people realise that the LibDems are a bunch of foolish trouble-causers with little else to sooth their bored pathetic minds.
It would suggest that they are a spent Protest voters group with no principles (this can be seen in their tactics of trying to unseat local politians) and their pathetic need to act like the sickly old trout of a Great-Aunt just makes you just wish they would die and leave everyone in peace instead of wasting everyone’s time and patience.
At least you are reading the papers today, Guido.
Sir Menzies Campbell is the answer to the question ... "can you think of an anagram of 'Mr Specimen Ball Size'?" It's on everyone's lips here in Islington.
Whisky & Westminster (http://www.garageband.com/song?|pe1|S8LTM0LdsaSkaFizZGo) if you care to listen to it.
Which of the Lib Dem front benchers looks most like a Prime Minister compared to the compromised Gordon Brown or the callow David Cameron?
Ming gets very high marks for: integrity, gravitas, intelligence and not looking like a kid politician just out of the uni debating society.
Grandma Stalin,
I'm off to a funeral tomorrow. What will you do all day?
Read the papers
So cutting!
I think Kennedy has been getting a bit of an unfair slating here. Under Paddy Ashdown, the Lib Dem share of the vote fell, and in 1997 we got 17% of the vote. Now, even when the party are supposedly struggling, and with countless observers saying there will be a Lib Dem squeeze (bullshit), the Lib Dem vote in opinion polls is staying solid at around 19%. At the last election it was the highest since 1983, and we returned our greatest amount of MPs since 1923.
CK has to maintain unity in the party, and his non-combative approach has kept the party from fighting itself. Yes of course there are disagreements within the party and these are often commented upon, but the general public outside "Westminster Village"'s impression is of an unified party.
We have failed to capitalise on the Tory's problems, but would the Lib Dems have been able to usurp them at the last election with a socially liberal, economically liberal programme? That might be my ideology but I'm not sure it is the countries' at large. The "paleo-libertarianism" that Tim Worstall referred to in his article for the Times about a month ago may be one of the predominant ideologies of the blogosphere, but I'm not sure Mr and Mrs Bloggs in East Grinstead would be big fans of it.
And of course the question is of whom to take over if CK was deposed. Hughes is too divisive and belongs to the Lord Grieves school of "wet" nanny-state liberalism, which the beard and sandals brigade would lap up. Campbell is possibly too old, and I'm not sure that the moralistic, paternalistic stance that has won support in Fife is the right way forward across the nation. Clegg is too inexperienced. Laws or Oaten perhaps???
I think that comment might become a blog entry in my new blog! It's a bit of an epic for me.
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