Once, it would have been overlooked. But today the new deputy leader of the Liberal Democrats is announced with suitable fanfare on page four of the Times: he gets a single paragraph in the “news in brief” column.
His entire purpose in life is summed up with a single, memorable, sentence: “Simon Hughes was elected as the Liberal Democrat deputy leader last night and given the role of reassuring the party’s unsettled elements.”
It reminds us of a newspaper cartoon published in the early autumn a few years ago. Two Taliban leaders are crouched on the side of a mountain watching a massive battle taking place in the valley below. One says to the other, “I wonder what they’re debating today at the Liberal Democrat conference.”
