Policy fails to ignite passion at lukewarm launch meet

IF EVER a political event needed a warm-up man to instil even a scintilla of animation in the audience it was at yesterday’s launch of the Liberal Democrat general election manifesto in central London.

This was not an occasion to set the pulse racing. If Liberal Democrats have any passion in their souls, they certainly kept it bottled up.

The speakers, even the saintly Vince Cable, were solemnly acknowledged by such desultory and reluctant hand-clapping that it did not even merit the description of “applause”.

It was as though they were all in church, terrified of displaying any kind of enthusiasm or emotion.

Nick Clegg and his colleagues did their best, but this was worse than Saturday night at the Glasgow Empire, where at least the punters told you what they thought, even if you didn’t want to hear it. Yesterday’s event was a study in indifference.

Clegg, who oozes his own brand of sincerity, was asked what he would do in the event of a hung Parliament.

He said that the largest party in such a scenario obviously had the right to govern but, wisely, he declined to predict specifically how the Liberal Democrats would respond.

Clegg was contemptuous of the “two old parties” which he claimed were conspiring to airbrush the recession out of the election and he insisted only the Liberal Democrats could offer a fair tax system.

Earlier, Cable, who is an accomplished and suave ballroom dancer, incongruously adopted for himself the soubriquet of The Elephant Man.

He accused the other parties of banishing the elephant from the room, namely the Government deficit. But we were assured that the Liberal Democrats would recognise that Jumbo was still there and could not be removed by the wave of an illusionist’s wand.

Meanwhile the author of the manifesto, chief-of-staff Danny Alexander, looked so dejected and sounded so doleful that he reduced the solemnity of the occasion to an almost funereal level. He observed: “This is a serious manifesto for serious times.” He, for one, was not playing it for laughs.

The diminutive Sarah Teather, who is defending her seat in North-West London, insisted that the party’s proposals were carefully costed. And she added just in case anybody who doubted her could be bothered: “The numbers are at the back, so you can do the sums yourselves.”

And here were we thinking that the party officials might have done the arithmetic themselves.