Tag Archives: bank holidays

Here lies the deceased. The Conservative Party, 1834-2025.

Or, to borrow from a certain former Prime Minister who encouraged the use of a handbag in less than diplomatic negotiations,

This is an ex-parrot. It is not merely stunned. It has ceased to be, expired, and gone to meet its maker. It is a parrot no more. It has run down the curtain and joined the choir invisible. This is a late parrot.

That of course was Margaret Thatcher speaking to the Tory Party conference, about the Lib Dems and our then new party symbol, “a bird of some kind” as she described it, in 1990.

Of course ironically it would in fact be herself who was (politically) defenestrated just a few weeks later when her own Cabinet turned on her and she stood down as Conservative leader and Prime Minister. Be careful what you wish for, some might say.

If any party knows about coming very close to its own political death it is the Lib Dems and our predecessor parties, sometimes reduced to just a handful of MPs. But, as our former leader Tim Farron likes to say, we Lib Dems are like cockroaches… almost impossible to kill us off.

It’s taken a decade since we were given a right royal kick in 2015 after our first time in UK-wide government since Liberal leader Archibald Henry Macdonald Sinclair served as the Secretary of State for Air in Churchill’s war time national Cabinet, but under Ed Davey’s steady leadership, punctuated by the occasional cringeworthy stunt to garner attention from a Westminster press pack who seem to have permanently forgotten that we even exist, we are back in a strong position on which we can and must build.