Author Archives: Stuart Lambert

On Monday night, four friends and I (all new members) hosted #libdempint, an informal event for fellow newbies in London. The original plan was to meet up together and share a drink or two. We thought we might get a couple of random strangers come along and make pleasant but slightly awkward political conversation with us. Instead, we had 100 fellow newcomers attend, three official speakers (Rob Blackie, Elaine Bagshaw and Tom Brake MP), and a couple of pretty interesting gatecrashers – a couple of lovely fellows called Tim Farron and Nick Clegg.

Needless to say, we hadn’t really expected any of this. Interest in what we’d set up has been phenomenal – national media have been interested but more importantly our follow up event next week is already fully booked, and so we’re putting on a third in the coming weeks.

All of this speaks to the very real sense of (perhaps renewed) energy that abounds in the party at the moment, as thousands of new members continue to sign up.

But among the hundreds of email conversations the five of us have had with some of these newbies over the last 10 days, as well as the face-to-face discussions we all had on Monday night, something else has become clear to us: a common thread woven through the motives of many of these people signing up to support the Liberal Democrat party.

That thread is a palpable determination to not let the last five years be brushed under the carpet.  Many of the people I spoke to on Monday night expressed this with no little passion. There seems to be both a fear that the party may react by recoiling from its time in government, and a consensus that to do so would not only be a waste, it would send a signal that the party believes it made a mistake going into coalition. We didn’t. We made a difference. We must always – always – be proud of that.