Hello Fluffy Friends!

I hope that everyone who went had a SUPER TIME at Spring Conference and that everyone who couldn’t make it enjoyed the total coverage here on Liberal Democrat Voice!

But now, straight back to work: very soon it will be the 100 day anniversary of new Liberal Party Leader, Mr Nick Clogg. So here is your OPEN INVITATION to join the panel for another bloggers’ interview!

All you need to do is promise to write about it. You can use your own diary or write up what is said for Lib Dem Voice. It couldn’t be easier.

I have already promised one place to the Judges Choice Winner in the Gender Balance Blogging Awards, Citizen Alix of The People’s Republic of Mortimer, but we still have five or six seats round the table for ANYONE to come along and ask Mr Clogg ANYTHING you like. Yes, even about that Europe vote, though there are plenty of other HOT TOPICS, including our new Health Policy and the Budget.

This interview is going to be in London (yes, again) between 6 pm and 7 pm in the evening of Tuesday 25th March.

So if you are able and would like to attend please leave me a message in the comments below, or e-mail me at . Please, please, please leave me a contact e-mail address because otherwise I cannot get in touch and tell you if you are coming!

BUT THAT’S NOT ALL!

In Liverpool, Mr Clogg came BOUNDING up to Daddy Richard in the bar to say:

Tell that elephant we want MORE people able to come along, so he’s got to organise the next interview in Sheffield!”

Well, we TRIED to shift the 100 days interview, but it was rather short notice and Easter hols intrude… so instead I have got an agreement that we will do ANOTHER interview, in about three month’s time and, as promised, it will be in the North for Bloggers (and others) who can more easily get to that (and feel free to stick your marker down in the comments below if you want to get in early and volunteer for that interview too)!

Watch this space for more details coming soon!

So, Sheffield will be next, but London this time and all are welcome, so please sign up to come along!

Love from Millennium

Now read my diary!

Hello fluffy friends,

I must start with a big fluffy THANK YOU to the MPs of the Liberal Democrat Shadow Cabinet who have responded with great generosity and openness to being asked for an interview by a soft toy and ordinary party member.

We had a jolly good interview with Liberal Democrat Shadow Foreign Secretary Mr Ed Davey last week. Not only was he generous with his time but he even bought the drinks to go with our doughnuts!

He had a lot to say about that infamous walkout from the House of Commons – that it wasn’t at all planned and that he WAS really really cross! And he talks about our position on the Lisbon Treaty, how is OPTIMISTIC about the outcome of the American election, and how we should be diplomatic and even-handed in our approach to the Middle East conflict.

But you can read all about it from:

Mr Gavin here;

Me here;

Mr James (G) here;

Ms Merel here; and

Me (again) here; and

Mr Gavin (again) here.

Look out for write ups from Mr Jonny - here - and
Ms Linda - here - too!

Next time, towards the end of March, we hope to be interviewing the Party Leader, Mr Clogg himself, to see how he has done after 100 days. Watch out for the invites nearer the time!

Love from Millennium

Now, read my diary!

Dear friends,

Mr Ed Davey, Liberal Democrat Shadow Foreign Secretary, has bravely and generously agreed to offer us bloggers some of his time for an interview to cover the wide range of Liberal Democrat Foreign Policy!

This is a particularly busy and exciting time for the foreign affairs team, with the European Reform Treaty that is passing through the House of Commons causing a lot of interest, but also the elections in America and Pakistan, the Olympics in China, the situation in Darfur and the ongoing battles in Iraq and Afghanistan.

I know that lots of you will be interested, and so, in the interest of opening up these interviews to more people, we should like to invite more of you to join in. Place ARE limited, but we would like to see some new faces. In particular, we should like at least one person who would be willing to write up the interview for Liberal Democrat Voice. So you can have a go even if you don’t have your own blog!

The interview will take place in London at 7pm in the evening of Monday 3rd March, and we hope to squeeze about an hour into Mr Ed’s busy schedule.

Applications in the comments column below, please, so long as you have an e-mail for me to contact you.

Go on, give it a go!

Love from Millennium

(now, read my diary!)

Hello, fluffy friends.

So… who wants to interview the Leader of the Liberal Democrats with me?

Such a lot has happened since last I wrote to you.

Sir Mr the Merciless has taken the LONG WALK; Mr Frown has shot himself in BOTH FEET; and Mr Balloon is still RUBBISH.

The Liberal Democrats will soon have a NEW Party Leader, either Mr Chris or Mr Nick, and you may have already read that I (OK, and some other people) went along to INTERVIEW both of them. I think that the interviews went RATHER WELL, and certainly showed both candidates at their best. The question is: do we want that to be the end of it? Because I am thinking that this might be something that is worth keeping going.

What is EXCITING is that BOTH candidates have said so too, and what is more, said so ENTHUSIASTICALLY. That is RIGHT: the new Leader of the Liberal Democrats (whoever wins) has agreed that we should carry on having a regular “Bloggers Interview Panel”.

What this would mean would be that several times a year, about half-a-dozen people – bloggers but otherwise normal Party members – will get to meet and quiz the person at the very top of the Liberal Democrats: ME!

Er, and the Party Leader.

Hopefully this will be a tremendous opportunity, a chance to open up a new dialogue between the top of the Party and the membership, and a lot of FUN.

The thing is: who gets to come along?

When we started this, and credit where credit is due, it was Sir Mr the Merciless who first invited us, the panel was made up of the people short-listed for the Liberal Democrat Blogger of the Year Award. When the Leadership Contest was called and we got in touch to organise our leadership interviews, we added other prize-winners to get a bit more diversity. And for a bit more gender balance we have added some more ladies too.

But increasingly it is looking less like a panel of nonimated Top Bloggers and more like some people I have, er, met.

That’s not very fair and it’s not very Liberal Democrat.

So, that is what I am here to ask you about. How do we arrange for a wider and more representative selection of the Liberal online community to be able to take part?

The FIRST important question is how many people would WANT to take part, who would want to have a crack at interviewing the Party Leader?

There are one or two obvious basic rules. Panellists would have to be party members; they would have to have a diary published on Lib Dem Blogs Aggregated, and they would have to write up the interview for their online diary.

The SECOND question after that is how do we get a reasonable panel out of the people who want to have a go?

What seems to work well is a panel of about a half-a-dozen people for each interview.

Continuity of panellists is an advantage, enabling people to follow up on points raised in earlier interviews, or just to develop a better relationship with the Leader and the other bloggers, but fresh ideas are also necessary. And we want to have a broad range of perspectives: young and old, North and South; ladies and gentlemen and elephants.

So here is my PROPOSAL. I think that each year we should pick a pool of about a dozen people, who will go on the panel. The Winner of the Blogger of the Year Contest gets a place, obviously. Perhaps the Winner of Best New Blog and Best Blog by an Elected Person should have places too, to get some different perspectives. Maybe even all the category winners! And at the same time we should run a poll or nonimations through Lib Dem Voice for another ten places. Add to that we will co-opt highest placed runners up, so that the pool always has at least two men and two women and two people who’ve not been on before.

Once we have our pool we can set up a rota, probably by drawing lots at the start – people can always do swapsies if they want to – to make sure that everyone gets at least a couple of goes on the panel.

I shall organise it and chair it and provide the DOUGHNUTS, but if I don’t get nonimated then I will BUTTON my TRUNK and won’t ask any questions.

Do you think that this sounds FAIR and FLUFFY? Please comment below!

Remember, my aim is to come up with a plan that will be OPEN and FAIR and bring in LOTS of people, but at the same time is EASY enough to be managed by a SOFT TOY.

Obviously there ARE other possibilities.

For example, I thought QUITE HARD about just organising the interview (subject to the Leader’s convenience) and then advertising the time and date here on Lib Dem Voice to make the invitation completely open to Lib Dem Bloggers.

That LOOKS like it would be more straight-forward and democratic, but it’s actually PRETTY COMPLICATED to think of a way of picking out the applicants that is both FAIR and SEEN TO BE FAIR by everyone who might want to take part. (I am not a one elephant Electoral Commission, you know!)

You might also want a say on whether there should be some sort of TERM LIMIT, like the Americans have for their Monkey-in-Chief and like you can’t win Blogger of the Year two years running. Personally I think NOT – if you are good enough to get nonimated time after time, then so you should be! And making sure there are two new people each time should keep things from becoming STALE! But you might DISAGREE!

We should also think about LOCATION, LOCATION, LOCATION. So far we have held three of our interviews in LONDON. This is because it is CONVENIENT, what with all the MPs working in that big old CLUBHOUSE there. But it might not be convenient for YOU – especially if you are blogging from EDINBURGH. We would have to think CAREFULLY about how – as an AMATEUR organisation – we could make that EASIER.

We did, though, do our FIRST interview – with Sir Mr the Merciless – when we were in BRIGHTON at Conference, and this might be a GOOD place and time to organise future interviews. Conference, I mean, not just Brighton!

And we shouldn’t necessarily limit ourselves to JUST interviewing the Party Leader. There are three candidates for the role of Party President, for example. Nor should we forget that there are Liberal Party Leader’s in Wales and in Scotland as well, and a TOPPING candidate for London Mayor, and also Liberal Democrats actually IN POWER in councils across the country, including major cities like Liverpool and Newcastle.

I hope very much that you will agree that this is step forward in RECONNECTING people to their democracy. Hooray for the Liberal Democrats, leading the way again!

If you have ideas or would like to get involved, please leave me a FLUFFY MESSAGE in the comments column below.

If there are enough people who want a go, then I shall ask Mr Lord Deputy Stephen very nicely if he wouldn’t mind helping me to organise a POLL.

I think that this is going to be VERY EXCITING!

Love from
Millennium

(Read my Diary!)

* Millennium Elephant keeps an online DIARY, twice short-listed for Lib Dem Blog of the Year, which you can read here.