Lembit pokes it?

I know Lembit Opik is married to a weather forecaster; perhaps she could use some of his clairvoyant skills? Despite his railing against those "sniping" at Kennedy, this article he wrote recently for the slightly pitiful LibDem website "Meeting the Challenge" about the need for the party to take political risks seems remarkably prescient...then again maybe this sort of daring thinking is just what is driving those Liberals to try to topple Champagne Charlie...

"If you’re risk averse, you’re on the wrong planet. In the words of Hank Williams, “I’ll never get out of this world alive.” Death is the inevitable consequence of everything we do. So why is it that we’ve come to fear risk so much?

It seems to me that it’s all about fear of losing something you regard as valuable. People with nothing to lose feel utterly free to be themselves, because there is no sanction to hold them back. Often, these people come across as courageous and principled. By contrast, people with something to lose fear to speak out if, in their judgement, this compromises their chance to hold onto that valuable thing. It follows from this that those people with something to lose and the courage to risk losing it in the interests of the greater good who are the most courageous of all."

"There are those who say you have to chase votes in order to drive change. I disagree totally. I say you drive change and the votes chase after you. People aren’t really very interested in politics. So they don’t cut politicians much slack. They know the real thing and they can detect a fake, so there’s really no point in pretending you believe something when really you don’t. It’s far more effective to speak from the heart, even when heartfelt ideas are more controversial than the anodyne alternatives.

In practical terms, this courage should enable us to do something long overdue. We should, in essence, be willing to express the solutions, as we see them, in their bold simplicity, rather than worrying whether the country is ready to hear them."

Sadly, it seems from this morning's news that the party isn't quite ready for the Gospel according to Opik... At least this will run and run.