Some decent coverage is floating around, most of it surprisingly kind and/or noncommital about Clegg’s hair (the cut is fine, but Glorious Leader, step away from the Brylcreem).
The BBC emphasises the outreach aspect of the leader’s speech under the headline Turn to us in crisis, says Clegg. And despite the foregrounding in that article of his quote “Liberal values must prevail” they still manages to slip that puzzling old canard “What are the Lib Dems for?” into an accompanying piece (don’t tempt us, Auntie, you know what the standard comeback is). More interestingly, they were buzzing around the exhibition asking people what they thought of the prospect of dealing with Tories.
The Guardian accept Clegg’s speech as evidence that a new tax policy is on the way (as discussed previously here and in the comments) while in discussing the retention of the tuition fees policy, Allegra Stratton possibly reveals herself to be an avid reader of these very pages. Her words:
Well, serene calm has enveloped the Lib Dem party (previous causes for excitement: autumn conference last year was a fight about £20bn of spending cuts; the conference before that, Clegg’s maiden speech; and the conference before that was Ming Campbell’s last hurrah)
…there’s no party crisis looming for once. This weekend will be much less of a nail-biter than Autumn ‘08 (Make It Happen), Spring ‘08 (Clegg’s maiden voyage) and Autumn ‘07 (Campbell’s swansong).
Meanwhile both the Graun and the FT are intrigued by senior party strategists’ talk of using game theory to predict outcomes in the event of a hung parliament – as practised by Vince Cable at Shell, apparently. I’m intrigued too – I’d back us against the Tories in a late-night session at Games Workshop any day. Anyone out there who really knows this stuff, please do consider penning something for us.
The Indy, ITV and the Express all go for the “turn to us/leap of faith/liberal way out of crisis” appeal, and the Indy leader considers the opportunities that may be on offer to the Lib Dems in this “fast-changing crisis”. A pre-conference Times article discusses Clegg’s call for disqualification of failed bankers and, in a follow-up to last week’s column on m/paternity provisions, Clegg writes there himself about a new way of doing things.
Finally, because there’s always comedy, the inmates of the comments column over at the Coffee House Blog are all sniffy about Clegg and Cable laying into Mrs T and might not let us be in their gang.
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The phrase in the BBC “accompanying piece”:
The days of beards and sandals and wildly off-centre policy motions are not that long ago.
is in my view unacceptable from an organisation whose charter commits it not to be politically biased. It is an opinion, not a statement of fact, and it is an opinion which is hugely biased towards certain views in politics.
The beards and sandals have gone? Maybe I should have gone to Harrogate to keep the stereotype alive.
Alix, you’re right about the use of “What do they stand for” or “What are they for” by critics stuck for a missile.
We heard it again on Westminster Hour R4′s Sunday night at 10 programme.
Carolyn Quinn asked the labour MP for a comment on Danny Alexander’s LD pitch. The labour apologist said ” But what do they stand for, that is what I want to know”. DA obliged with a list.
I cannot understand is why the question is never turned back on labour and tories.
Why didn’t Danny say “Well come to that what does labour stand for?”, instead of giving the list, which always comes over as too defensive. We need a sentence or two that encapsulates us, and then we should turn the question on them.
Not bad for a Spring Conference, but yesterday’s newsprint is no longer used even to wrap fish and chips. Establishing a permanent foothold in the journalistic agenda is a long, hard sweat.
Is there a video of the full speech available on-line yet?
Speeches are up at http://www.dailymotion.com/user/libdem. As well as Nick’s we have Vince’s, Simon’s, Kirsty’s and Howard Dean’s. Links will be up on main conference page of party website in the next couple of minutes.
There are two things I know about Game Theory: some of the key developments were made by John Nash, who, according to “A Beautiful Mind” was nuts at the time; and that it was used extensively by the early hedge funds.
So Frank, you know “not much” about it and have decided it makes no sense.
Alix. As both a former GW employee and someone who spent a fair chunk of his degree learning the non-maths side, um, what do you wanna know?
It’s essentially a simple analytical tool to simplify situations in a way that maths can be applied to them, it can be predictive (sometimes scarily so), but like all things isn’t 100% accurate as essentially people sometimes do strange things.
Basically it’s a way of figuring out the odds and then figuring out how people will react to the odds. As it happens, it’s used on TV shows a fair bit—Deal or No Deal is a classic game theory system, and there’s one I’ve flicked past based on Prisoner’s Dilemma as well.
And those are the simplest tools from it. FWIW, we use Game Theory all the time when campaigning—it’s where the barcharts come from.
Jasper Carrot’s Golden Balls?
That’s the one, yes. Only watched the very end of it briefly, hence I only saw the PD bit, I assume it’s as terrible as it appears from the write up?
Never seen it – Only heard about it through Charlie Brooker’s Screenwipe and Ryan wondering whether it was a true prisoner’s dilemma.