I’ve been mulling over last night’s very unsatisfactory Cameron v Miliband election programme. At first, I couldn’t quite put my finger on why it left me feeling that it fell so far short of what might have been. Then the more I thought about it the more I realised that feeling had less to do with how either David Cameron or Ed Miliband performed than with the programme itself.
Quite simply, it was the wrong format, with the wrong presenters at the wrong time.
The format
Cameron: handled audience better
Miliband: handled Paxman better
I didn’t understand the mirror image format and I don’t think it worked. I felt that the audience first, interview second option was slightly the better except that there was very little join between the two. The awful selection of questions – too much about personality and not enough about policy – and the failure to consistently allow questioners a supplementary question certainly didn’t help. There is little doubt that Cameron was much more relaxed and confident in the audience section than Miliband and that he got a more coherent message across as a result. I was very disappointed that every question was pre-selected. It would have been much more edgy if it was opened up and a few unscripted questions were put to the leaders.
The presenters
Jeremy Paxman and Kay Burley failed to make the most of either element. Paxman was simply too Paxman. He has a very confrontational style which unnerved both interviewees at different stages but it almost gets in the way of the subject and certainly doesn’t make for a flowing conversation. His technique of constantly repeating the same question is rather tired. Make the point twice maybe and then move on. Most viewers of a programme like that are perfectly capable of making up their own minds whether a question has been answered adequately. He also seems increasingly to take pleasure in being rude, a style of interviewing that I expect turns off many people, especially women.
I’m really not sure why Kay Burley was there. She merely called the pre-arranged questioners and did virtually nothing else when it came to Cameron, although she did come alive abit more with Miliband, albeit over the rather irrelevant topic of his relationship with his brother. She should have positioned herself much more as an audience advocate, helping to ensure they got the answers they were looking for. There were hints of that but she always quickly shied away from adopting that role.
I don’t think the mirrored format helped either presenter. If they had both been the same way round then there could have been a much better pick-up from one to the other, ideally with Paxman linking in with a couple of key questions asked by the audience that he sensed they hadn’t felt were answered properly.
The timing
Quite simply, far, far too early. This whole campaign has already been ludicrously stretched out and is suffering from having no distinct phases. Having the first TV election”debate” the day after the final Prime Minister’s Question Time simply compounded that problem. We’ve moved in the blink of an eye from Parliament sitting to the hustings but with the tedious backdrop of almost 60 days solid electioneering behind us and the not very enticing prospect of 40 days of the same to come. We needed a clean break, a pause and, crucially, the publication of the manifestos before embarking on TV debate and interrogation. This would have provided greater substance and factual reality to the proceedings, making it unnecessary to indulge in so many personality questions.
With the manifestos out and the election campaign proper underway – by contrast with this extended phoney war – a Cameron v Miliband programme would have made much more sense. It would have made even more sense as the last programme, not the first but I suspect we have Cameron to blame for that.
Who won?
Both leaders will be relieved that neither suffered any significant damage, a negative way of assessing the outcome that befits the cautious, focus group driven nature of both campaigns. Personally, I thought Miliband came out slightly the better if only for the way he stood up to Paxman which clearly won the sympathy of the studio audience. Otherwise neither leader did anything – good or bad – that surprised me.
Yesterday was Post’s annual Motor Claims Conference and there was lots of Tweeting going on. I’ve captured it using Storify and you can read the results.
Morning Sessions
<div%20class=”storify”>//storify.com/DavidWorsfold/post-motor-claims-conference-2015-part-i/embed?border=false<script src=”//storify.com/DavidWorsfold/post-motor-claims-conference-2015-part-i.js?border=false”></script><noscript>[<a href=”//storify.com/DavidWorsfold/post-motor-claims-conference-2015-part-i” target=”_blank”>View the story “Post Motor Claims Conference 2015 – Part I” on Storify</a>]</noscript></div>
Afternoon sessions
<div%20class=”storify”>//storify.com/DavidWorsfold/post-motor-claims-conference-2015/embed?border=false<script src=”//storify.com/DavidWorsfold/post-motor-claims-conference-2015.js?border=false”></script><noscript>[<a href=”//storify.com/DavidWorsfold/post-motor-claims-conference-2015″ target=”_blank”>View the story “Post Motor Claims Conference 2015 – Part II” on Storify</a>]</noscript></div>
Or you can view them on Storify itself.
This gives some idea of how events can be covered using Twitter and how you can overcome the objection many people have about spending too much time and effort on Twitter – that it is there one minute, gone the next. This is a way of capturing it permanently.
Regulators don’t often get praised. Let’s face it, they don’t often deserve praise. But the Financial Conduct Authority deserves a huge pat on the back for the revised guidance on social media it published at the end of last week. It is sensible, balanced and full of commonsense advice, not words most of us often use when describing regulatory advice.
When the FCA launched its consultation on social media for regulated firms last August I wasn’t hopeful. It was one of those cases of ‘I wouldn’t start from here’. So much of it seemed to miss the point of social media and its well-established role as a key communication channel between businesses and their customers. Clearly, there has been alot of very well-informed and intelligent response to that consultation and the FCA has listened very carefully.
It rightly notes that firms find it difficult when using character-limited forms of social media such as Twitter to comply with some FCA rules. This includes the key financial promotion rule, which says it must be made clear when a promotion is a promotion, as well as the need to include appropriate risk warnings. The consequence of this has been to stifle – often to the point of suffocation – well-meaning attempts by firms to use social media. The dead hand of compliance has killed many initiatives stone dead.
The new guidance should have a liberating effect and enable communications teams to make much greater use of social media free of the fear of incurring the wrath of compliance.
The FCA sensibly advises firms to consider whether it is appropriate to use character-limited media as a means of promoting complex features of financial products or services. To me this should never be a prime use of social media in financial services. It is a much more subtle and multi-faceted tool. To use it primarily as a product promotion vehicle misses the real potential which is to promote useful content and build customer engagement around that content.
The guidance has plenty to say about how to use social media as a means to stimulate engagement, essentially how to use it effectively within the regulations as a content marketing tool. It doesn’t quite put it like that but that is what lies at the heart of its guidance.
Of course, firms have to have the right content to engage customers and that will be a challenge for many firms but there are enough good examples around to show that it is far from an insurmountable challenge.
The guidance has plenty of illustrations of compliant and non-compliant use of social media to help people understand its approach. I advise everyone using social media in the financial services sector to read it. It is 20 pages of sound advice.
Of course, other challenges still remain. Creating the right content to support a social media campaign is essential. Finding where your audience is in the ever-changing social media universe is another ore-requisite for success. Alongside that it is important to have a thorough understanding of the platforms, the tools, how to measure engagement and create cost-effective social media programmes.
Some of us can help with all of that including content creation and Social Media Training for Financial Services Firms – just get in touch.
Most commentators seem to be lazily assuming that the better UKIP does the closer we move towards the EU exit door. The evidence doesn’t support this.
Putting the polling trends for UKIP since 2010 alongside EU referendum voting intentions shows the contrary: every time UKIP support jumps, the proportion of people who would vote to leave the EU declines.
This isn’t a particularly recent phenomenon either. When UKIP first hit 10% in the polls at the beginning of 2013 – and Cameron was panicked into announcing that he would hold an In/Out referendum – support for leaving the EU suddenly collapsed. This shouldn’t have been too much of a surprise as it had also happened a year earlier when UKIP support first poked above the 5% mark. Although the proportion saying they would vote No recovered a little during 2013 it has never risen above 50% again and steadily declined during 2014.
UKIP may have celebrated the success of its high risk strategy of getting two defecting Tory MPs – Carswell and Reckless – to put themselves up for immediate re-election but it appears to have further damaged the prospects of achieving its cherished ambition of seeing the UK leave the European Union as there is now a 10% gap in favour of staying in.
What appears to be happening is that every time the prospect of actually having a vote on our EU membership edges a little closer, more people stop to think about the issues and decide that we are better off remaining on the inside rather than hurling abuse at it from the outside. I also think that the additional media exposure UKIP, and Nigel Farage in particular, receives as its poll ratings rise doesn’t help its long term cause. Clearly, there is a growing minority who are attracted to Farage’s disjointed rhetoric which is why UKIP could be a significantly disruptive force at the General Election, although emerging with only one or two seats.
A far greater proportion of the electorate are not taken in by Farage’s bluster. Indeed, the poll trends suggest they are repelled by it which is why the support for leaving the EU is declining.
It is probably even worse for UKIP and the anti-EU camp. Add to mix the Don’t Knows and the experience of the Scottish referendum is that if they are galvanised into voting they will split substantially in favour of the status quo – staying in the EU.
I am always shocked by the number of people who need to make presentations as part of their job – almost an essential requirement for people moving up the management ladder – who let themselves be stripped of personality and turned into dull, inspiring clones.
We’ve all sat through presentations by management consultant types which have been overloaded with Powerpoint slides, mechanically delivered and oh so routine. Safe but dull. I’ve worked with hundreds of people to take them on that difficult and, for many, frightening journey from behind the desk to the front of the stage and my starting point is always to build on people’s own personalities. It works. It produces better, more confident speakers.
I was delighted to have the opportunity to discuss my approach with Roger Edwards, a leading marketing strategy and social media consultant in the financial services sector, for his weekly podcast.
We also shared some views on the challenges facing the financial services sector as it gets to grips with social media.
Other articles on Presentation Skills and Public Speaking
The Perils of Boardroom Presenting or How the Mighty Fail
Don’t let those public speaking fears crush you
Oborne set out his case in a powerful, passionate article on the Open Democracy website
The high profile departure of Peter Oborne from his position as the Daily Telegraph‘s chief political commentator has sparked a fierce debate about editorial integrity. It is an important debate and one that should be carried out in public, in front of and involving the readers and audiences we all crave and which commercial departments have to monetise.
I have worked in business-to-business media, mainly covering financial services, for over 30 years and the tension between commercial and editorial departments has been a fact of life for my entire career. At its best that tension is creative and inspiring; at its worst it is sordid and dishonest. There are plenty of examples of both ends of that very wide spectrum played out daily in newspaper, magazine and website offices.
For me transparency, honesty and integrity have always been the cornerstones.
Can sponsored content really add value?
Sponsored editorial content has been around for years and can provide readers with valuable, high quality information, especially in business publications. The challenges for an editor when presented with a sponsored content opportunity are to win the trust of the sponsor and then to ensure that readers know the content is sponsored. What the sponsor is buying is access to your audience, your readers. If they are remotely intelligent they will also realise that they are buying a partnership with your brand and its values because that it what the readers buy too.
For me that always meant working with sales teams and sponsors from an early stage to set the objectives, content and style of any sponsored content, an approach that applies to print, online and events. This has worked many times and when it does it delivers great content for the readers and real value for sponsors. When it doesn’t work – for instance, when a dumb PR person gets hold of it and thinks it should be all about products and mention the company in every other paragraph it becomes a waste of everybody’s time and money: readers will just flick past it whether it is on page or on a website.
The second challenge is to get it labelled clearly: tell the readers it is sponsored. This has actually proved the harder battle to fight over the years and has undoubtedly got harder in the digital era. I believe readers appreciate the honestly and clarity. They are perfectly capable of making up their own minds what delivers value to them and do not want to be misled. Just about every market I have worked in has been blighted by a bucket shop “ad-for-ed” competitor which thinks its readers are stupid and can’t spot the correlation between who is advertising and the coverage they get (or don’t get in the case of HSBC and the Daily Telegraph). It is a fools’ game, a race to the bottom and hardly ever a recipe for long term commercial success. Quality advertisers and sponsors want to be associated with quality editorial products and readers want to be able to trust what they are reading: holding the line on this nonsense will pay off in the long term.
The media must be more transparent
Transparency applies in other ways too and the national newspapers have been poor at this for years. I give you one example to illustrate the point.
Just over ten years ago the switch by large numbers of insurance companies and others to call centres and back offices in India was generating alot of comment and I contribute my fair share to that. The chief executive of one insurer – Patrick Snowball at Norwich Union (Aviva) – took me to task over some of the things I wrote and said it was ill-informed and I ought to go an see for myself. I politely pointed out that my modest editorial budget was not going to stretch to a trip to India so he responded by offering to take me (and a couple of other journalists) to India for a week to visit a range of call centres.
I went and wrote several articles on Indian call centres for the various publications I was working across at the time and at the end of each one I put a footnote saying the trip was paid for by Norwich Union but that they didn’t exert any influence over what I wrote (not even a request for a quote check – another real blight on modern journalism). To me that left the intelligent reader to make up their own mind on the value of the content. I call that honesty. These trips go on all the time and I hardly ever see mention of who paid for them in articles or alongside videos. Why?
Sometimes you just have to be tough
There have been times when I have not been flavour of the month in advertising departments, especially when writing something that upsets one of their major clients. This is where editors and journalists have to have thick skins but also be prepared to justify what they have written. My favourite story is about the collapse of Independent Insurance in 2001.
Bright: upset was an understatement
Two years prior to that I had a big – I mean big – falling out with the chief executive of Independent Insurance Michael Bright over something I had written which got under the skin of his considerable ego. Unable to sue me (I found out years later he had lawyers crawling all over what I had written but it was quite simply true and fair comment) he decided to withdraw all Independent’s advertising and sponsorship from Post Magazine, the main title I worked on at the time and back our competitor Insurance Times to the hilt, along with other fringe titles. This made for some uncomfortable conversations with our advertising department but I was not prepared to backtrack on what I had written and, to give them credit. they understood my stance even though the sight of large Independent adverts elsewhere must have caused them constant grief and individually cost them money in lost commission and bonuses.
Vindication came two years later when Independent collapsed, leaving in its wake a long list of creditors, including Insurance Times which never got paid a six figure sum for advertising it had gladly taken from Independent. I couldn’t help feeling certain sense of vindication. Six years later I sat in Southwark Crown Court and watched Bright sentenced to seven years imprisonment for his part in leading the fraud that brought Independent down.
Peter Oborne has lifted the lid off a murky world and has done the media and the public who depend on it for honesty, complete and impartial coverage of the issues and industries that matter to them a huge service. If it helps restore some of the balance between editorial and commercial departments so they can work in partnership and not with one dominating over the other then we will all be better off.
I am struggling with this endless General Election campaign. It is, of course, an inevitable consequence of the move to fixed-term Parliaments, a reform I am still largely in favour of. However, a glance across the Atlantic should have been enough to prepare ourselves for months of campaigning.
We’ll be exhausted by the time Polling Day finally arrives on 7 May
What is disappointing is the way the political parties have responded to this challenge. They are using the electorate as one giant focus group to test an endless stream of disjointed policy initiatives lurching from the health service one day, to education the next and the economy the day after – and so on. There is little sense of an overarching theme with any of this except, tellingly, from the Scottish Nationalists. There should be no mystery as to why the SNP continues to poll strongly – it has its big idea and remains stubbornly focused on it.
The absence of a coherent narrative joining together the daily diet of unrelated policy initiatives is crippling the main parties. The polls aren’t moving because they are not engaging the electorate (just exhausting us) and they are not engaging us because we have no real sense of the vision of what they are offering for the next five years. We have a vague of what they stand for and don’t stand for and they are playing around the edges of that hoping that one day, one policy will hit the mark and shift just enough floating votes their way to make a difference. It is a directionless, passionless form of campaigning that deserves to fail.
Manifesto damp squibs?
What would shake up the political agenda would be if one party was brave enough to stop test marketing policies and publish a manifesto that communicated a vision, a sense of direction and built a powerful narrative linking its policies. My guess is that in this elongated General Election campaign the manifestos will be a damp squib, little more than a collection of the policy announcements we have already heard and which have got a vague thumbs up from the pollsters. I expect this will be true of Labour, Conservatives and Liberal Democrats. This may create further opportunities for the minority parties already upsetting the establishment apple cart.
The SNP already seems well-equipped to avoid this trap but the opportunity is also there for the Greens and UKIP to make further inroads into the votes of the mainstream parties by creating a simple, strong and focused narrative. UKIP will attempt to do this around its simplistic anti-EU message and would do well to avoid making too much fuss of the manifesto Nigel Farage is meant to be writing after its complete abandonment of its 2010 manifesto. The Greens are quietly creeping up on the outside but don’t seem to have found the accelerator pedal yet: there is time.
Lack of campaigning momentum
The barrage of daily policies currently being inflicted on us also highlights another looming problem with this campaign: how will the parties maintain, let alone build, the momentum as polling day approaches? They can’t rely on the TV leaders’ debates to do that alone if they haven’t developed a strong core message by then. I see a real danger that the debates could become just another squabble about whatever policy initiative happens to have grabbed the attention that day, turning them into an extension of Prime Minister’s Question Time and further turning the electorate away from political debate and the political process.
There is a big prize to be won by the party bold enough to break away from the present fragmented, directionless, uninspiring mess.
The Committee on Climate Change seems a little late to the Flood Re party. This independent body set up to advise the government has come out with a barrage of criticisms of the joint government and insurance industry initiative to ensure affordable flood insurance is available to all homeowners.
It has done so on the day that Flood Re announced that former government minister Mark Hoban will be its chairman, the latest in a series of rapid steps taken towards implementation following the passing of the relevant legislation.
It is rather late to be raising some of the points the CCC’s expert on adapting to global warming, Professor Lord John Krebs, has aired in a letter to Flood Re’s chief executive Brendan McCafferty. Some of his concerns, such as the inclusion of properties in Council Tax Band H, have been argued over in Parliament and have become part of the terms of reference for Flood Re so it is hard to see what benefit there is in revisiting those arguments now.
However, Lord Krebs does raise some interesting issues that won’t go away and which Flood Re should address.
Flood Re: can it persuade insurers to embrace ‘resilience’?
He talks alot about resilience, arguing that more needs to be done to make high risk homes more resilient to flooding. He is right in identifying what needs to be done but hasn’t brought together all the elements that are needed to push this to the top of Flood Re’s agenda. It isn’t, as he appears to suggest, just a matter of using the threat of higher insurance costs as a negative incentive for householders to do more to protect their homes and make them more resilient.
This starts with the government. Spending on flood defences has to be maintained. Developers and the planning authorities have to be penalised for building on flood prone land if not prohibited altogether. These are matters of government policy.
The insurance industry also has a major contribution to make to improving resilience and must stop running away from its responsibilities in this area.
I have argued for many years that insurers could do more to encourage flood-resilient reinstatement when dealing with flood claims. Over 20 years of spiraling flood claims they have done far too little to make the properties they insure and which have been flooded significantly more resilient to the next flood, arguing that it would amount to ‘betterment’. This, they say, isn’t what the policyholder has paid for and would push up claims costs. They even worry that if they paid extra to make a property a better risk the householder might then go and insure with one of their competitors. I have always thought that a rather blinkered, short-term perspective.
If all insurers agreed to a package of reasonable – not extravagant – improvements they could make to properties that are flooded that would directly contribute to lower claims costs and a shorter reinstatement periods the next time a flood hits then it would be an investment in reducing future costs. It isn’t too hard to imagine many householders seeing their insurers investing directly in better protection of their properties actually being more prepared to contribute themselves to additional measures. That would certainly go some way to ticking Lord Krebs’ boxes.
Perhaps this is something Flood Re in its privileged position as a pan-industry scheme and without the competitive concerns of individual insurers to cramp its response could promote. It would be a constructive response to the CCC’s concerns.
Flood Re has taken an important step closer with the Government’s confirmation that the legislation needed to enable the new pooled flood insurance scheme to be set up will be presented to Parliament in the New Year. With some key appointments confirmed at the same time it does look as if two years of talking are at an end. The focus is now firmly on the practical steps to be taken to get it up and running by July 2015.
The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs announced at the same time that properties in Council Tax Band H (and I in Wales) will be included in the scheme. This deals with one of the most obvious anomalies in the Government’s original proposals which would have seen owners of these properties contributing to the levy – set at 2.2% of premiums – but not eligible to benefit from the scheme if they have a claim. This was a crude, if minor, piece of social engineering totally inappropriate for private insurance. If governments want to redistribute wealth and promote equality they have a vast array of tax and benefits tools at their disposal.
The Somerset Levels in full flood. (from http://www.dillington.com/blog)
The Government has also removed a lot of the uncertainty about when it will step in should the cost of meeting claims ever overwhelm Flood Re. A sensible compromise about how far it might be subsidised from public expenditure and how this and its capital requirements will be reviewed seems to have been reached.
Leaseholders out in the cold
DEFRA has rejected most of the other pleas for the scheme to be extended, probably correctly, although I still think some consideration must be given to the problems faced by business property owners who live on the premises, such as pubs and B&Bs. Leaseholders have been quick to complain about their exclusion but they are running businesses for profit and should be expected to pay the market rate for insurance if they want to let properties in high-risk flood areas. Owners and occupiers of ground floor flats may find they have issues with obtaining affordable contents insurance and this needs to be kept under review.
Should small businesses be in?
Small businesses will also feel aggrieved that their pleas to be included in Flood Re have been rejected but the small business lobby never really came up with a viable proposal for their inclusion. People speak emotively about “small businesses” but what, exactly, is a small business and when would its premises be eligible for subsidised insurance? And who would subsidise it? Big businesses or other small businesses in low flood risk areas? Flood Re works on a cross-subsidy from low-risk domestic properties to high risk properties but you can’t ask homeowners to subsides businesses. The small business lobby simply failed to address these issues.
2009 cut-off retained
Properties built since 2009 will also remain outside the scheme in order to discourage the building of new properties on flood plains. It still looks a rather arbitrary date and could leave a lot of people on modest incomes exposed to high premiums, possibly even unobtainable cover. Perhaps it is necessary to have a simple, if rather blunt, cut-off in order to get Flood Re off the ground. I would hope that as it gets established this will be reviewed with reference to known and identifiable flood risks when planning permission was granted. If a flood risk was known at the time, it should be excluded; if it wasn’t, it should be covered by Flood Re.
The challenge now, however, is to get Flood Re off the ground with major decisions to be made on placing the reinsurance cover and putting in place operational systems that will be able to cope with the volume of claims Flood Re will receive when (rather than if) there is a major flooding incident in the next few years.
The unpredictability of severe weather means that it will have to be ready to respond on day one next July. After all, the 2007 floods that devastated so many parts of the country happened in June and July.
Jeremy Thorpe, who died yesterday at the age of 85 after a thirty year battle with Parkinson’s Disease, was one of the dominant political personalities of my teenage years. He spoke a language that transcended the sterile class warfare that Labour and the Tories had sunk into in the 1960s and was hugely refreshing because of it. He was a fierce opponent of the evil racist regimes in Rhodesia and South Africa and his courage in speaking out against them was also attractive to many a teenage radical.
He was also a victim of his own confused sexuality in an era far less tolerant than our own. This drove him into a series of bizarre responses to Norman Scott’s vindictive campaign against him which led to his spectacular downfall. That story is retold in vivid detail in many newspapers and websites today and makes sad reading.
For me it is as a brilliant campaigner and a passionate radical Liberal that I will remember him, alongside the modest dignity with which he accepted his exit from public life and his years of illness.
Thorpe: a charismatic platform orator
He was never afraid to be outspoken on a cause he believed in and his opposition to the illegal racist regime in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) marked him and the Liberal Party he by then led as a brave and distinctive voice in a timid world. While the Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson was making the white rebel leader Ian Smith feel undeservedly important by negotiating endlessly with him, Thorpe came up with a more direct solution: bomb the sanctions busting railway lines. Wilson’s attacks on Thorpe were vicious, labelling him “Bomber Thorpe” but I still believe Thorpe was right. The sanctions against Rhodesia were ineffective because the railways from the African coast carried goods to and from the illegal regime with impunity. Cut the supply lines and Smith’s regime would have probably buckled, saving the country from years of guerrilla warfare and, maybe, the blight of the Mugabe regime today.
Thorpe was also the Liberal leader who knew when to say no to the Tories.
Many of us who campaigned for the Liberal Party for the first time in February 1974 held our breath when he walked into 10 Downing Street at the invitation of Ted Heath who wanted a coalition with the Liberals to keep the Tories in power. Despite being offered the job of Foreign Secretary, Thorpe rejected the coalition as it lacked cast iron guarantees on cherished Liberal policies such as electoral reform. What a shame Nick Clegg didn’t take the same stance in 2010.
He was a colourful, genuinely charismatic politician of a type we rarely see nowadays, putting principle before naked ambition as he showed in 1974.
He was also a committed European who would have destroyed Nigel Farage, not pussyfooted around him as today’s party leaders do. I always thought his greatest campaign was the EU referendum in 1975 when he outshone whoever he shared a platform with at some huge rallies – Ted Heath, Roy Jenkins and others were constantly overshadowed by Thorpe.
Many obituaries have commented on his brilliance at recalling names and faces: it was an astounding gift which I never saw fail him. I remember my late mother thinking she was one of the most important people in world when on meeting him briefly for the second time at a Liberal Party Assembly sometime in the mid-70s he remembered her name, where she came from and that her son was a Young Liberal despite us not sharing a surname (my mother, a young widow, had remarried).
One story I must share from later in his life illustrates his humility and simple humanity. We were at a Christmas party at Jonathan Fryer’s house in the early 1990s and when we noticed our two eldest daughters Eleanor and Olivia had disappeared I went to find them. They were with a few other young children sitting on the stairs with Jeremy Thorpe telling them some wonderful Christmas stories. The children were enthralled but had no idea who this man was until a lady guest walked past and said that one day they would read about him in their history books. Jeremy just turned round and said “I don’t think so. I’ll be a tiny footnote at best”. He deserves more than that.
David Worsfold 