“Three-minute countdown,” shouts a voice. Well, all right! The room begins to fall silent. The 50 or so candidates who have been chosen to be the backdrop for the event all raise their placards.
The Lib Dems have suddenly become a lot slicker. Time was when the party’s launch would have been in a disused sewage works. The sort of place where Thames Water turn clean water into shit. Now we are on the third floor of a loft space in a converted factory near Shoreditch in London. Where the hip people used to be. It all feels a bit New Labour. Nothing wrong with that. So long as no one mentions Nick Clegg. Lib Dems still have to cross themselves whenever his name comes up.
