It couldn’t compare for loftiness or length with Fidel Castro’s “History will absolve me” speech from the Cuban dock in 1953. Nor, it can be said with some confidence, for historical importance either. But as a reasoned attempt to justify his actions and bring a bit of hope to his chastened followers in dark political times, Nick Clegg’s speech to the Liberal Democrat conference in Bournemouth was quietly effective, even if it carefully avoided anything that could be described as a difficult question.
Clegg has barely put his head above the parapet since the Lib Dems were all but swept away on 7 May. But he walked on to the stage to a standing ovation from the party he led into government and then led into the wilderness. That says a lot about the Lib Dems – smiling and whistling under all difficulties as if they were the Scout movement, which in some ways they rather resemble. But Clegg’s message – that in spite of the general election drubbing there is still a big role to play – was hugged close by a party that for the last five months has had little to hug except its memories.
He was introduced as the former party leader and the former deputy prime minister, which are both true, but these things only emphasised his and the party’s rapid collapse. Last year plenty of the men and women rattling around the conference venue were Whitehall ministers or advisers or bag-carriers. This year there is just a decent and resilient but undeniably marginal party still trying to understand what hit it. There is a complete disjunction about the proceedings at Bournemouth: a party that has been “battered at the ballot box”, as Clegg put it, still debates the finer points of global climate change strategy or nuclear defence policy as though it has the power to influence them.
Clegg was certainly not in a mood to be contrite. The Lib Dems were “proud and unembarrassed” about their past, he told them. However much the result of the election hurt, he would “never waver” in his pride at the coalition’s achievements. There was barely the tiniest hint that anything the party had done since 2010 had been mistaken. But when he listed some of those achievements there was only the merest scattering of applause in the hall. The delegates’ silence suggested they may be more aware of what has hit them than the former leader is. The truth is that Clegg seems still in no mood to ask difficult questions. His way or no way, has always been the message. More Frank Sinatra than Fidel.
Like many others in his party this week, Clegg seized on the belief that the centre-ground in politics is “standing empty”. That is what this party has often hoped, from the days of Jeremy Thorpe to those of Charles Kennedy. Tim Farron has been talking the same talk. Jeremy Corbyn could be a lifeline out of the abyss, Lib Dems believe. With the Tories now unbound since the demise of the coalition, both major parties are turning to the extremes. The Lib Dems could be the “comeback kids” of politics, Clegg claimed. Maybe they can. But they have a long hard climb ahead.
These are difficult times for liberals, Clegg admitted, and not just in Britain. It was an interesting thought but one he didn’t develop. Austere economic times and large-scale refugee crises are not the most propitious of circumstances for liberalism to flourish in. But some commentators have even suggested that globalisation means Europeans are now living in “post-liberal” times. That would not be good news for the Lib Dems if it is true, and Clegg, perhaps not surprisingly, wasn’t going to go there in what is likely to be his only major speech for some time. Perhaps the pain is still too raw and recent for that.
