Farron: We’ve got minds of our own

Lib Dem party president Tim Farron comments on recordings of Lib Dem ministers expressing concern over coalition policies:

“All we’ve discovered from sending a couple of journalists to do a kind of News of the World job on a Liberal Democrat minister so far is that Liberal Democrats have got minds of their own, we have our own views and opinions and yet in a coalition you don’t get everything you want, you have to compromise on things. If the Telegraph had done the same thing to the Tories I’m absolutely confident we’d get the same story in the other direction.

“In some ways I think these revelations are quite helpful as they remind people the reality that you’ve got two distinct and individual parties that are compromising.

“One of the problems the media have is getting over the fact we had for 13 years this Blair-Brown spat when there was fake unity of the face of it and then this nasty personal stuff under the surface. In a coalition you’ve got this approach where people don’t fall out on a personal level, but they do have robust discussions because we think different things.”