Today’s Call Clegg was quite extraordinary. We know that there’s been a big push by some of the more authoritarian figures in the country to try to build a case for the so called Snoopers’ Charter over the past few days. It was obvious Nick was going to be asked about it. The caller, Vince (no, not that one) from Kingston was very supportive of Nick’s position. What happened next was that Nick Ferrari played recorded messages from former Metropolitan Police Commissioner Ian Blair and the Secretary of State for Defence Philip Hammond urging him to change his mind.

It’s a sign of how far we’ve come in the past 3 years that public disagreement between Cabinet colleagues hasn’t been ramped up to some sort of constitutional crisis in the media. Can you imagine the furore if Hoon had done that to Prescott?  Have we really got used to Coalition?

Anyway, in the face of this, Nick was calm, rational and resolute. He went through each proposal in turn and explained why it was a problem, or what the Government would do about it.

I think the thing to do on something as emotive as this is, is to really, sort of break it down to actually what is being proposed.  There’s quite a lot of people making a lot of sweeping statements. You know we’ve got to monitor everybody overnight or we can’t increase any of the surveillance powers at all.  Actually there were  three specific things were proposed in the so called snoopers’ charter.  One, every single website that you Nick and everybody else listening to this visits, tshould be stored for a certain period of time.  Every website you visit, everybody in this country, every website you visit should be stored. And I think this wasn’t just my view by the way,  I don’t come with these sort of views capriciously, this is something which a cross party panel of MPs said was a very, very big step, not undertaken in any other developed democracy anywhere in the world and was, was deemed by them and by many others to be a disproportionate step.

“I’m an old fashioned liberal..”

And there was better to come. The next caller suggested that those who preach hatred should be silenced. Nick again clearly expressed the liberal viewpoint:

 I tell you in this important respect a liberal means this, is that I think abhorrent ideologies are best defeated when they are argued against, when they’re demolished and when they’re shown up to be as perverted and corrupt as they are.  If you were to say to someone like Anjem Choudary, whose views I suspect everyone listening to this programme  abhors, if you were to say the government is going to go after this guy, we’re going to stop him appearing on British television shows, guess what would happen in my view?  He’d become a hero, he’d become a hero in his own community, far from actually discrediting his appalling ideology you’d actually turn him into a figurehead.  Is that smart?  I don’t think it’s smart. I’m a liberal who passionately believes that moderation, non-violence, open argument is the way to secure our safety.

Beautiful children

What, he was asked, did he make of Jo Swinson’s remarks about complimenting children?

She didn’t say that a parent shouldn’t praise their beautiful children for being beautiful, I constantly tell my children that they are intelligent, handsome and wonderful in every respect because I’m so proud of them as all parents are of their children.  I think to be honest what she was saying was that to only compliment girls for how they appear, you know, you might also want to compliment them for how good they are at school, how well they do their homework and for a bunch of other things.  I think that was what she was saying, but I certainly don’t think she was saying, and I know she doesn’t believe, that you shouldn’t shower your children with any compliment that you want as a mum or a dad.

The caller had sounded hostile to start with but said that she had actually read what Jo said and agreed with her.

And what of Liberal Democrat swivel-eyed loons?

Graham from Bushey asked if there were swivel eyed loons in the Liberal Democrats. Nick actually managed to sound like he meant it when he said:

I have nothing but admiration and affection for my fellow Liberal Democrat activists.  And actually, I count myself as an activist, I love going out campaigning, I love going out knocking on doors.

Pressed further, he added:

No, we’re all entirely balanced and sane all the time.

You know, I’m not sure even I believe that. Could our leader really love us after all? Stranger things have happened, I suppose.

This was by far Nick’s best performance and it is well worth watching in full which you can do here. You might even want to watch it instead of Question Time tonight, as there’s no Lib Dem on it.

* Caron Lindsay is Editor of Liberal Democrat Voice and blogs at Caron's Musings. You can find her on Bluesky at caronmlindsay.bsky.social