Shields and swords

I’ve been a member of the Lib Dems since 1979, a terrifying thought. I hadn’t realised I was so old (though I was terribly young when I joined). For the past 31 years, I have been waiting for the moment when the Liberal case could be put with the combination of sanity and passion that Nick Clegg generated last night.

I went to sleep afterwards with an amazing sense of peace. It was everything I hoped (though kind of typical of ITV that there was no green question) since I first imagined Nick as leader of the party.

Of course, we are now going to have to be like a submarine after a successful attack on a convoy. We will have to endure the coming depth charge attack from the Conservatives, but it is worth it for the opportunities created.

I also learned a huge amount last night, about what is possible and what is not when it comes to policy that can be communicated. I am only too aware of what I have failed to understand, and got wrong, in the past.

But one thing I felt I got right, and I’m now sure about. This division between ‘shield’ issues and ‘sword’ issues – the distinction between those issues we can use to gain votes and those where we just have to protect ourselves – is nonsense.

The best form of defence is attack, and there is no area where we can’t formulate policies based on clear Liberal thinking which can be used to press forward the cause. Anything else is a kind of pathetic sense that what we believe is somehow bound always to be unpopular.

Having just spent two months in the USA, and talked to endless miserable and depressed people on the left – convinced that there is nothing they can do to tackle the tide from the right – I feel this is a lesson we urgently need to learn, before we end up like them.

So many on the left, including some Lib Dems I serve with, seem to have an inner assumption that our policies are deeply unpopular and must at all costs be hidden behind a ‘shield’. All else is populism.

Well, it’s nonsense. In fact, an articulate, aggressive liberalism, of the kind we saw from Nick Clegg last night, is the only way of countering the slow spread of lazy Fox News-style intolerance.

Right, now – close watertight doors and prepare for the depth-charges!