Nick Tyrone – that’s T-Y-R-O-N-E – concludes the article as follows:
Instead, the Lib Dems will lose on Thursday, most likely fairly badly, and they will have no one to blame but themselves. If they want to get back to being the by-election masters of old, they will have to do a lot better than this.
You can read the full article here: https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-lib-dems-are-utterly-lost
* Paul Walter is a Liberal Democrat activist and member of the Liberal Democrat Voice team. He blogs at Liberal Burblings.
Follow @libdemvoice.org on Bluesky
Like us on Facebook
Subscribe to our feed
Sign-up for our daily email digest
Chase Park fair photos
Green and Lib Dem Southwark brings government closer to voters
A swamp of lies and disinformation
Doing better? The goal must be Sufficeincy
Michael Meadowcroft (1942-2026) - A Liberal to His Core
Kira Collins
Tom Reeve
theakes
22 Comments
The Iories can eat their dung.
Tories
With a t-Tories
He wasn’t the only one to misread this by-election; John Rentoul was equally dismissive in the Independent, and you wouldn’t have got an inkling that an upset was possible from the BBC’s coverage.
Note the sneering tone of the article. This is so typical of the Spectator. When it doesn’t have an argument, it sneers instead, and the pseudo-intellectuals that lap it all up think they are clever because they belong to the same echo-chamber.
That article ranks alongside Margaret Thatcher’s “dead parrot” speech before Eastbourne and John Curtice’s prediction of Willie Rennie being tailed off in Dunfermline in 2006.
Nick Tyrone of course ran Nick Clegg’s Think Tank. His main recommendation in his Spectator article, as in all his blog posts, is that the only hope for the Lib Dems is to return to the approach he so ‘successfully’ advised on during Clegg’s time.
No thanks.
Brilliant result in Chesham. The first really good one in over a decade.
The image originally came from Tim Farron. Always good to see the cockroaches of British politics striking back!
Congratulations to the Lib Dems. Nick Tyrone wasn’t the only one to call it wrong. So did many including myself.
I think we probably all made the mistake of thinking that the Sarah Green and Lib Dems would continue to whinge about Brexit and run a campaign based around that. It was much more effective to say nothing at all on the matter. Let it go. Accept the result and see how it goes over the next decade before raising the matter again.
Having said that many would have like at least some political discussion during an election campaign. But if the electorate don’t like the idea of HS2 and more housebuilding on their patch then telling them they are wrong, like on Brexit, does come at a cost.
This the lesson which is there to be learned.
It is possible to have an election without the B word crossing anybody’s lips. Brexit stands for more than a referendum and more than leaving the EU. Those associated issues are not going to go away any time soon ….Meanwhile one of the most hopeful comments of the morning came not from a Lib Dem but from Dominic Grieve who suggested that a lot of people in C and A had cottoned on to the idea that the PM is a charlatan….
Well done Nick Tyrone. You have won this year’s Michael Fish award.
@ Geoff Reid,
“Brexit stands for more than a referendum and more than leaving the EU.”
Like what? The EU is hardly a bastion of democracy. The squashing of the Democratically elected Greek government in 2015 was evidence enough of that.
Just let it go. The Lib Dems, nationally, have learned how to lose when the EU is an issue. Now learn from Sarah Green on how to win when policies are tuned to what the electorate actually wants.
Correction: The EU is a bastion of democracy. Very obviously so and a major reason why countries with troubled undemocratic histories have embraced the EU.
So long as geography stays in place, the EU (and how it develops in the future) will always be a major issue. Where else in the world do countries cooperate within a balanced democratic structure? By so doing they enhance their mutual prosperity; that the UK (or whatever there is of it) is set to lose out incrementally cannot be ignored.
Well done, Alex B!
Martin: Agree with your assessment of the EU, while it may not be perfect it is whole lot better than where the UK finds myself at this moment in time, the Chesham and Amersham result gives me a little hope that more people will reject Boris Johnson’s vision on the future of our country and how it is governed.
Nick Tyrone being his usual condescending self. An d who did he used to work for? Yes Lord “moneybags” Marshall, later a funder of Leave EU, and a backer of GBNews
Some of us were warning back in 2004 that these people were never Liberals, just free market maniacs who thought our party was a useful short term vehicle for their true aim of bringing in a right wing Tory government.
I suggest every active Lib Dems reads a copy of The Prostitute State by Donneachd McArthy (apologies if I’ve spelt the name wrong!) which gives chapter and verse on how British politics and our party were hijacked by the super rich and corporate lobbyists. We must now move on and become a radical Liberal party again.
@ Martin,
It’s obviously a hard thing to do, but maybe you could try to avoid the B and EU words. There’s no mention of them on Sarah Green’s website. She’s smart enough to know how to win elections.
The best type of Progressive Alliance would be to leave the more Socially minded and probably contentious policies to the Labour Party. Labour won’t ever trouble the Tories with campaigns centred around greater equality and eliminating poverty in the richer leafy suburbs of South Eastern England. On the other hand the Lib Dems have the ability to take what might, at first sight, to overturn impregnable Tory leads.
Just stick to safe issues like preserving the countryside, making sure underpasses aren’t flooded, keeping children safe on our roads etc etc. If in doubt ask Sarah what works and what doesn’t.
Peter Martin. My whole point is that I’m quite happy not to harp on about Brexit. That does not stop us affirming openness, international co-operation, diversity etc. These things are connected.
There is one point in this rubbish from Nick Tyrone which should be taken seriously, and it was in effect also made by John Curtice in his comments this morning. Anti-Brexit was the one policy which connected the LibDems to the priorities of (part of) the electorate. That has gone, and so far nothing distinctively LIbDem which resonates with the concerns of the electors has replaced it. Paddy Ashdown revived the party 30 years ago by majoring on education – getting the LibDems “best party for education” polling results. A similar approach is needed now to get the party a distinctive national profile once more.
Well as Paui Homes and Steve Comer said, although sadly I didn’t really take the libertarian infiltration of the party seriously until 2008/9. I seem to have picked up somewhere that Tyrone is/was Mr Polly Mackensie, another one of the collective masterminds behind Clegg’s leadership between 2009 and 2015.
Adrian Sanders: You are correct about Nick Tyrone; he *is* Mr MacKenzie.
Steve Comer: His name is spelled Donnachadh McCarthy. He is a former Lib Dem activist who left the party in the early 2000s. He was known in the Party as “the man whose name you dare not spell”.
In Richmond one of our leading activists is called Donncha, pronounced the same way. He is also a rather similar character to his namesake with the longer spelling.
I think the name is Irish for Duncan (or rather, Duncan is English for Donncha, Donnachadh, and probably a number of other variant spellings as well).