3 Comments

• MARGARET WHITE 22nd Sep '11 - 8:39am

  Someone posted a response on the Independent’s website that the film made by Charles Kennedy was an attack, but a mind and friendly one.

  I’m ot sure it’s very friendly to be focusing on the [failures and failings] of the Party he still refers to as ‘we’ and ‘us’. There are plenty of those pure and honest moments when we stand in front of the mirror and we know and understand our shortcomings. Not sure my friends would stand in front of everyone and remind/inform them of just how far I have to go or where I’m going wrong. If he’s got advice for Nick Clegg then he should pick up the phone and speak to him.

  I think the sole purpose of this film is to get people to focus on where he thinks the Party is going wrong. There is nothing positive or encouraging. It is an attack and it comes across, to me at least, as something petty and undermining.

  I’m glad he’s not my ‘friend’.

• DunKhan 22nd Sep '11 - 1:15pm

  @MARGARET WHITE

  Clegg, for all his ability in rhetoric and compromise (the former of which made him a golden boy last year), lacks a certain awareness. He is in very many ways like a Conservative or Labour leader, allowing himself to be cocooned in his particular grouping within the party, and I think that has made him unresponsive to both the views of the remainder of the party and, far more importantly, to the people who vote Lib Dem.

  He does not see the value in acting as his potential voters would suppose he would, determination and sticking to your guns is a positive but if the voters think you have different positions to what you do … well, it won’t end well. Hence all of the braying about betrayal (I think it’s overblown of course).

  This is summed up by his being surprised that so many LDs disliked the Conservatives and his utterly stupid comments on the Lib Dems having no more future as a party of the left. If the Lib Dems are seen as a party of the left, they have at least a short-to-medium term future as one, as that’s what the voters expect. If the Lib Dems are not to be a party of the left, the time to state that is not around a year after an election where they were seen to be one.

  So, Kennedy’s “attack”, quite frankly, is an absolute godsend to Clegg, if he pays attention. Kennedy may be on a very different wing of the party but he is a big hitter, presiding over the most successful general election (seat-wise) in the party’s history, and his saying “it’s been a tough year, learn from your mistakes” is a message to be listend to. Clegg needs someone important to get him to wake up and smell the coffee. Although he is better about standing up for the party and the party’s voters recently, he still lacks political nous for this kind of thing, why did it take conference to get him to oppose Lansley’s initial NHS proposals for instance?

  So the more “friendly attacks” the better, quite frankly. Every attack gives him a better chance of suddenly seeing how he should carry himself in government, why he should fight for every inch of ground and then try and take one more. And, from his point of view, reducing the (high) probability of him still being an absolute electoral liability come 2015. God pity Lib Dem PPCs if Clegg is still leader in 2015 and hasn’t cleaned up his act.

• Paul McKeown 23rd Sep '11 - 2:40pm

  Charles Kennedy’s ultimate message “pick our fights and make sure we win them” is surely timely and wise. If senior LDs were secretly to carry out some sort of strategy review then one would have thought that a shortlist of winnable fights should figure high on the agenda.