LDV at 10: Pick of the posts: The one with the naked man

On 27th August, LDV will be 10 years old. In that time, we’ve brought you over 24,000 posts and published over 337,000 comments. Over the Summer holidays, we’ll take you on a nostalgic meander through a decade of Liberal Democrat history, seen through the eyes of our editors and contributors. We hope you enjoy our choices.

This is one of our more iconic posts. Former co-editor Stephen Tall made a bit of a rash promise on the Daily Politics in 2013. He said that if the Liberal Democrats only  won 24 seats in the General Election, he would run naked up Whitehall.

Well, sadly, the election result is history. Stephen could have got off on a technicality, but he did the run, on, of all dates, the anniversary of Margaret Thatcher’s birth, pretty much naked and filmed for the Daily Politics. Enjoy.

Stephen Tall, formerly of this parish, has honoured the pledge he made to run naked down Whitehall if the Liberal Democrats were reduced to 24 seats.


In doing so he has raised, at the time of writing, £7,200 for Medecins sans Frontieres. If you haven’t donated already, please do, it is a very good cause, and would show your appreciation for Stephen’s barefaced cheek(s).

And here’s the video, broadcast the next day:

This is how you keep a pledge, however hard it might be.

Stephen has also done a Storify thingy of the event and the tweets he received which you can read here.

I must confess, we had assumed that he would be filming this on a Sunday morning when there was nobody about, not a busy Tuesday afternoon. We at LDV have subjected poor Stephen to some ribbing about this, but we are very proud of him and the fact that he’s now raised over £8000 for Medecins sans Frontieres.   It was good to see Kelvin Mackenzie cough up his promised £5000 on today’s programme.

Things to watch out for in the video: the yellow dangly bits and the horse that looked as if it was shaking its head in disapproval.

And if you’ve watched and sniggered, you need to donate. Them’s the rules.

 

Thanks, General. Good to see at least one member of the crowd was unphased.

If you want to be part of the next decade on LDV, write for us!

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This entry was posted in From the LDV Archive and Op-eds.
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