Last night, many of conference’s reps took time out from drinking and singing in the Glee Club to watch the lunar eclipse. At least two of us recalled other times we’d seen them. For me, it was more than twenty years ago as a cub scout standing outside Tenbury Wells High School where we used to meet, before we moved on to a purpose built scout hut next to the swimming baths. Back then we still wore shorts, socks with bands of elastic holding them up, neckerchiefs, woggles. I don’t suppose anyone would be surprised to hear I had an armful of badges. The representative next said the last time he’d seen a lunar eclipse, he’d been on the banks of the Amazon. Slightly more exotic.

I did try to take a photo of the moon, but armed only with my cameraphone, that was unsurprisingly ineffective. So, I took a picture of people watching the moon instead.

Yesterday’s conference speech in the Trident debate was about the best I think I’ve ever seen him. Impassioned, impromptu, impressive and moved the debate on.

As readers will know, I’m not pre-disposed particularly to like Ming, and I wasn’t buying his argument on Trident either. And yet I was impressed by what he said – and it was at about then in the debate I made my mind up that even if the amendment fell, I’d still vote for the unamended paper, as better than nothing.

I’m not sure, however, I buy the theory that it was Ming that swung it. No, that was shadowy strong-arm tactics. Key PPCs got phonecalls from high-ups. Local party chairs (like me) got a lobbying pack we were supposed to give to our conference reps posted out to us, but those on the other side of the argument were denied first the opportunity, then the data list to send the mailing themselves. Lots of the Parliamentary party were brought to wave their voting cards. All of that adds up to more than the 40 votes that swung the argument.

Moving on to today’s keynote speech. A good performance. A good speech – and as I was hearing it, it was setting me thinking along the lines of plenty of good material to plagiarise from it for leaflets. As there always has to be, there was plenty for the audience hearing it there and then, and plenty for audiences beyond.

But I’m still not happy. I’m cross about the need to stage manage the final speech so much. The video montage of Ming was tolerable.

But the pointless engineering of not one but two standing ovations was a bit much. It looked like the entire shadow cabinet were stationed on the front row primed to leap to their feet clapping the minute the leader appears, guilting the rest of us to follow suit. I’m too bloody-minded to join in, but pretty much everyone else did. I thought there were more bolshies than that!

The same deal was repeated at the end of the speech. In fact, if the shadow cabinet hadn’t leapt to their feet cheering, I wouldn’t have known the speech had ended.

It’s now become important that the clapping at the end goes on for a while because the journalists are hiding in the wings with stopwatches to benchmark this year’s claps against last year’s and read some huge significance into changes. (That’s why Charlie was rushed off stage at the last conference, it would somehow be considered embarrassing if we’d clapped more for him than for the leader.)

So to keep us clapping, we now have to watch the leader wander through the crowds, shake hands, kiss Elspeth repeatedly.

It’s all a bit unsavoury, and missing a sort of British reserve. There’s something of a messianic cult about it. We’re the British Liberal Democrats, not some sort of congregation going for spiritual advice. We’re not there to bow down in adulation before Ming, we’re there to hear what he says and decide for ourselves whether or not it’s reasonable. Just the day before, when we were wandering around telling each other it had been an excellent debate, and how other parties would never dare to do that, and so on, we were congratulating ourselves as representatives for being able to think and reason rationally, even if we came out with different answers. Then a day later, it seems we’re all supposed to pretend we’ve been struck with some sort of Mingmania and the man can do no wrong. I don’t like it, and I would be surprised if Ming likes it. He has a deserved reputation as an elder statesman, and we don’t need to reinvent him as some sort of snakeoil salesman who needs 2,200 Lib Dems to cheer him out of the room.

Two busy days in the run up to conference.  Thursday was spent trying to get ahead of self, and largely failing.  As well as all the work, I had to get a Lib Dem newsletter printed and off to the volunteers who will stuff it on Monday.  Since I’ll be in Harrogate away from my printer, I had to get it ready in advance.

Which meant slaving over the Riso at midnight.

Which meant taking my eye off the clock.

Which meant my bloody car got locked in the Bingo hall car park again, and I got stranded in Chesterfield after midnight.

Which meant I didn’t get home until 10am on Friday, which was both the first day of Lib Dem conference and a family funeral.

Lots of mad running around, driving across the country on unfamiliar roads, turning up at a hotel (Chesterfield) and a guesthouse (Harrogate) in the middle of the night, relying on sat nav which worked – arriving at a crematorium with 80 minutes to spare – and then let me down – dumping me in the countryside 20 miles north of Harrogate at gone midnight…

Thank heavens for conference bars open till, erm, well, quite late actually. I really needed the, erm, several beers I’d had to miss during the day since I was driving. I didn’t leave the bar till well after three.
It’s all rather surreal.

And being in the conference bar with the last men and women standing is hilarious, particularly if most of them are way drunker than you.

Sad to hear that Alan Simpson will be standing down at the end of this parliament, not least because I’m sure I heard that he was intending to challenge Gordon Browm for the premiership post-Blair.

He has frequently been a critic of the Labour party locally and nationally, and I think some of the local Labour councillors see him as a thorn in their side.  Certainly one of them seemed to follow him around at public meetings just so that someone from the audience was “on message” even if the MP wasn’t. We have had some fun in the past using Alan Simpson quotes as the basis of questions at Council just to see the reaction!

At the last general election, our candidate, now councillor for Wollaton East and Lenton Abbey, said often that it was difficult to share a platform with Alan Simpson and find something to disagree with him about.  Both our guy and the Labour MP seemed to share a distaste for much of the Labour government’s actions.

And now in his resignation letter to his local party, he is once more critical of his colleagues.

Mr Simpson, 58 and first elected for Nottingham South in 1992, said there were “not enough” good Labour MPs.

Mr Simpson said in a letter to party members: “There are good people in the Parliamentary Labour Party but not enough of them. At times, I feel that colleagues would vote for the slaughter of the first born if asked to.”

We’ve got to get that on a leaflet!

I was out before nine am this morning delivering leaflets I should have delivered earlier on the way in to the office, when I stumbled across this propped up against a fence, on Nottingham’s ring road, Western Boulevard.

I wasn’t sure what it was at first – something industrial looking and a heap of electronics. A fish tank hood, maybe? When I got closer it became clear it was a traffic light. You know, a red, amber, green type traffic light head, or in this case, red, amber and No Right Turn. Its bulbs were still attached, and some of its workings spilled on the ground.

So, I called it in to the Council, telling them two things were worrying me: one, that there was tipped rubbish on the pavement, and that two, probably somewhere nearby, a traffic light was missing…

It was surprisingly light, when I tried picking it up. All made of heavyweight plastic, not the metal it looks like it ought to be.

Just heard that, give or take a month or twenty-one, the Government has faced down the Catholic leadership.  I didn’t believe they had the bottle, so kudos that they have.

Now on to Group.  Preliminary manifesto discussions tonight.  What fun.

Today is Holocaust Memorial Day, and it’s being marked in Nottingham with a large number of stalls and activities in Market Square.  As part of that, councillors were asked if they’d like to make readings, and I volunteered.

I spent last night googling for some suitable text that talked about gay victims of holocaust – like maybe an extract from “Bent” or something similar, but in the end plumped for this text from the  Holocaust Teacher Resource Center.  I abridged it slightly.

It was certainly contained information I didn’t know before.  The scariest part were these facts, that came towards the end of the reading:

After the war, homosexual concentration camp prisoners were not acknowledged as victims of Nazi persecution, and reparations were refused. Under the Allied Military Government of Germany, some homosexuals were forced to serve out their terms of imprisonment, regardless of the time spent in concentration camps. The 1935 version of Paragraph 175 remained in effect in the Federal Republic (West Germany) until 1969, so that well after liberation, homosexuals continued to fear arrest and incarceration.

(Paragraph 175 was a Nazi law that banned lewd and lascivious behaviour between men)
On the way home, I bumped into a Labour team out canvassing the ward I live in (which is a Lab/Con marginal.)  This lot are a nice bunch of people, effective councillors, and we had a nice chat that stopped them working for several minutes!

I can’t remember the last time I went out delivering Focus when it was so cold. Can it really have been the Ipswich by-election when I definitely recall leafleting in the snow?

The thermometer on my car hasn’t read much over 0 all day. Taking leaflets around Meadow Brown Road the little pond (under the control boxes) had a skim of ice over it, and every bit of shallower puddle was frozen solid.

I was kitted out as much as I could be – coat, scarf, hat, and fingerless gloves that both keep me warm and but still let me have enough dexterity to separate out the leaflets. But it was still perishing, and I was glad to get home.