NHS Q and A not a cure for Lib Dem ills

The Q and A session on the NHS reforms is a lot better for the leadership than the full-scale debate and vote that a majority of delegates wanted but can’t have (they couldn’t quite get the two thirds majority rules required). But even the Q and A is trickier than the leadership imagined when it was put in the original agenda.

Back then the leadership thought Shirley Williams was won over to the post-pause Bill with amendments. Baroness Williams though has more recently changed her mind and has just said that it is “totally obscure legislation” without an obvious point to it.

Elsewhere, Tim Farron attended this morning’s regular MPs’ morning meeting at conference but he would’ve found yesterday’s (which he missed) more interesting I think. His line in his Sunday speech that the coalition was a marriage heading for divorce in 3 or 4 years couldn’t have been much more off-message as far as some fellow MPs were concerned and they used that meeting to share their thoughts. Talk of  “3 or 4 years” to divorce, MPs said, raised the spectre of the Coalition being brought down early (presumably by the Lib Dems leaving it) without actually spelling it out.

Tim Farron’s speech also talked about staying together “for the kids” saying that by that he meant “the special advisers.” Ministers and loyalist MPs said that was a crowd-pleasing piece of populism intended to play into the rhetoric that the ministers and their SPADs have gone native in Whitehall. All a bit over-sensitive of them?

I’ll get to chat to Tim at 1 in a fringe meeting at Conference so will come back to you with any illumination from him.

Follow Gary Gibbon on Twitter @GaryGibbonBlog