What lead were the Liberal Democrats giving to parliament and the nation on foxhunting? Were they standing firm in defence of our traditional country sports? Or were they protecting small furry mammals from being persecuted by toffs on horseback?
The answer, not for the first time in the history of the modern Liberal party, is that they were doing both and neither. Lib Dem MPs from country seats voted for hunting or abstained. Lib Dem MPs from the seaside and the suburbs voted almost without exception to put foxes first.
You could almost hear the wheels whirring as each Lib Dem MP calculated whether he or she had more to fear from the Countryside Alliance or the League against Cruel Sports.
By contrast, MPs in other parties seem to have voted for good or ill according to conviction rather than geography. Kate Hoey, one of the few Labour MPs to vote for hunting, sits for Vauxhall, where they probably haven’t seen a horse since the brewery stopped using drays.
But on this issue, as on many others, the only principle that Lib Dems seem to adhere to is that of telling you what you wish to hear. Charles Kennedy introduced his party’s “pre-manifesto” last week by telling us that he is sometimes asked: “You Liberal Democrats are doing very well, but what do you really stand for?” The question appears to cause him no unease. If voters continue to drift towards the Lib Dems in a cloud of unknowing, who is he to dispel their ignorance? And this pre-manifesto is a blissfully reassuring document — as soft and cuddly and toothless as a newborn woodland creature.
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No university tuition fees, no top-up fees either, £25 a week more on the old-age pension, free local bus and train travel for the elderly, not to mention free personal care in residential homes, more affordable homes to rent but no building on greenfield sites, no more council tax, fair prices for farmers, no more congestion or pollution or nuclear power or GM crops, more doctors and nurses, more policemen, more overseas aid — and no tax rises except for the tiny minority who earn more than £100,000 a year.
It is hard to think of a challenge that is not ducked or a dilemma that is not dodged in Kennedy’s big rock candy mountain.
Yet if you are a wavering Tory who still worries that the Lib Dems may be too fluffy to attract your vote, they have another line to offer that can be shown to favoured customers.
A fortnight ago, with much less fanfare, almost surreptitiously in fact, Kennedy unveiled a collection of essays by some of his leading social and economic spokesmen. For many rank-and-file Liberals, this Orange Book, as it is called, may be as outrageous as Aubrey Beardsley’s Yellow Book was to respectable Victorians.
Its authors are a different crew from the amiable types who normally churn out Liberal policies. They include former vice-presidents of Citibank and JP Morgan, the founder of an asset management firm, Shell’s former chief economist, PR men and tax experts — not a woolly jumper among them.
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And their critique adds up to a sustained condemnation of pretty much everything the Liberals have said and done since Jo Grimond retired.
David Laws, their Treasury spokesman, says quite candidly that “the practical proposals of the Liberal Democrats have become disconnected from the philosophy and principles out of which Liberalism has developed”.
The party, he says, has become centralist “nanny-state liberals” who have watered down their old free-market principles and become addicted to their own version of democratic socialism, just as Grimond had warned. Lib Dems need to have a tough programme to pull power back from the centre, and that includes Brussels. They should not be afraid to demand the widespread repatriation of powers from the European Union and to sweep away all agricultural subsidies.
Similarly, the only thing wrong with privatisation is that it has not gone far enough. Sell off the Royal Mail, scrap the Department of Trade and Industry, abolish capital gains tax, get rid of regulations, all this and more urges Vince Cable, the Lib Dems’ shadow chancellor, who bears an unnerving resemblance to the grimmer sort of Victorian ironmaster.
Much of this hard-edged stuff could have been lifted bodily from the combined works of Michael Howard and Maurice Saatchi. Not a lot of it finds its way into the Lib Dems’ pre-manifesto.
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I cannot, for example, see anything about Laws’s dramatic proposal to break down the NHS into a system of competing insurance schemes, nor about the plan to set up a compulsory second state pension scheme that would be funded and would mean huge increases in insurance contributions.
If you take into account all the pollution and congestion charges and all the vague promises to improve this or that service by unspecified and uncosted means, the overall increase in taxation of one sort or another would be horrendous — and certainly could not be met by higher earners alone.
Not surprisingly, Kennedy won’t be bestirring himself to bring all this to the ears of the faithful at Bournemouth this week. After all, they joined the Liberal party in order to get away from that kind of thing.
But the leadership will at the same time be whispering to the media that the soft-headed statist approach was really a hangover from the merger with the SDP. We shall be told the party is now returning to the admirable small-government agenda of Gladstone and Grimond.
So if you read the pre-manifesto you may retain the impression that the Lib Dems are still slightly to the left of Vanessa Redgrave. If you believe the Orange Book, they are a fraction to the right of John Redwood.
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Innocent souls may find this double game somewhat shocking. The awful thing is that it will probably work.
For we must never forget the immortal words of Jimmy Maxton, the Red Clydesider of the 1920s, when he was told that he could not be in two parties at once: “All I say is, if you cannot ride two horses, you have no right to be in the bloody circus.”
Kennedy attacked Tony Blair’s tactics over the hunting bill as “cynicism writ large”. So that makes two of them then.