With apologies to the magnificent Jeff Wayne.
Tall, dark, handsome stranger – Halt! Who goes there?
Familiar old smoothie – Err. Friend?
Tall, dark, handsome stranger – Be on your way! This is my territory!
Familiar old smoothie – Your territory? What do you mean?
Tall, dark, handsome stranger – Wait a minute… It’s you! The former leader of the non-Coalition Lib Dems!
Simon – Good Heavens! The former leader of the Official Lib Dems! I thought you’d surely defected to the Conservatives!
Nick - I thought you’d surely defected to the Greens!
Simon – Have you seen any Labour Party recruiters?
Nick – Everywhere! We’re done for, all right.
Simon – We can’t just give up.
Nick – Of course we can’t! It’s now we’ve got to start fighting. Not against them, ‘cause we can’t win. Now we’ve got to fight for survival. I reckon we can make it. I’ve got a plan…
We're gonna build a whole new regional powerbase for ourselves. Look, any voters in Sheffield, the West, Scotland, or South London clap eyes on us and we're dead, right? So we gotta find a new set of constituencies where they'll never find us. You know where?
Northern Ireland.
You should see it over there – people with orangey-yellow rosettes everywhere (that’s us, right?) – politically correct now after the Peace Process, dark, quiet, safe. We can build constituency associations and everything, start again from scratch.
And what's so bad about basing ourselves in Northern Ireland eh? It's not been so great depending on Scottish, Northern and Cornish support, if you want my opinion.
Take a look around you at the world we've come to know,
Does it seem to be much more than a crazy circus show?
But maybe from the madness something beautiful will grow,
Based in Northern Ireland, With just a handful of men. We'll start, we'll start all over again, All over again, All over again, All over again, All over again.
We'll make public spending promises on schools and hospitals and barracks in campaigns for the Northern Ireland Assembly - if Westminster doesn't like it, we can campaign for additional powers for the assembly! Everything we need - nationalised banks, extra prisons... We'll hire a special Holyhead ferry to bring in volunteers and candidates, and men like you'll train them - not legalising drugs and rubbish - pavement politics, so we can take control of the local government. We'll win over the villages and towns and... and...
we'll arrange an Ulster-wide referendum on joining the euro! Listen, maybe one day we'll put up a candidate for European President, eh? Impose an EU-wide directive on the voting system with QMV and then wallop! Our turn to do some wiping out! Whoosh with our holding the largest number of seats in Parliament - Whoosh! And Cameron and Osborne hoping for minor cabinet seats in a coalition at the expense of a collapse in their own poll ratings. Lib Dems on top again!
Since the loss of the AV referendum, our polling has faded fast, but with the collapse of the Coalition the chance has come at last, To build a better party from the ashes of the past, with a natural Ulster powerbase, and just a handful of men, We'll start all over again.
We began the Coalition with a honeymoon, but I soon became a slave, tainted with cutting spending on everything, from the cradle to the grave – You yelled: ”The weak fell by the wayside! Only the strong will be saved!” We need a post-Coalition world, but with just a handful of men, We can start all over again.
I'm not trying to tell you what to be, Oh no, oh no not me - after all, I’m a Liberal! - But if Lib Dem-ery is to compete, The few of us left with seats, They're gonna have to build this Party anew, And it's going to have to start with me and you, Yes!
I'm not trying to tell you what to be, Oh no, oh no, not me – you wouldn’t listen to me anyway - But if either of us is going to win next time, The few activists still aligned with us, They're gonna have to deliver an awful lot of leaflets, Yes and we will have to draft them on our own laptops!
Just think of all the poverty, the hatred and the lies (under Gordon Brown), And imagine the destruction of all that you despise (especially the House of Lords), Slowly from the ashes, the phoenix will rise (it is a phoenix in our logo – right?), from a brave outlying province, With just a handful of men, We'll start all over again.
Take a look around you at the brief stint in government I loved so well, And bid all our seats in the Scottish Parliament a long sad last farewell, It may not sound like Heaven, but at least it isn't a coalition negotiation with Ed Balls and Peter Mandelson,
It's a brave new world, With just a handful of men, We'll start, We'll start all over again, All over again, All over again, All over again, All over again.
Can't you just see it? Liberalism starting all over again - a second chance. We'll even form a cross-Member State understanding with the German Free Democrats and attend their conferences, you and I can give speeches. Nothing can stop visionaries like us. I've made a start already. Come over here and have a look.
[On his blackberry was a draft website, with just ten words of text, that had taken him a week to design. Simon felt he could have set that up in about five minutes, and suddenly had (far from the first time) a familiar sensation of the gulf between Nick's likeability and his ability to actually deliver any votes in ballot boxes.]
Nick - It's doing the TV appearances and the Party strategy that wears a feller out. I'm ready for a bit of a bit of a visit to Brussels. How about a dinner with a European Commissioner, eh? Make sure they know who ought to be boss.
[They gave quick speeches to the other twenty-one delegates, and then Nick insisted upon doing a Powerpoint presentation on how the party would do if PR were introduced. As Simon remarked later: “With our party on the edge of extermination, with no prospect but decades of two-party rule, we actually debated the relative merits of STV vs the Borda Count system!”
Later, Nick talked more of his plan, but Simon saw red rosettes flashing in the deep blue night, SNP posters gloating, Green activists moving distantly - and decided enough was enough. He wondered why the SDP had ever formed a coalition with the Liberals in the first place, felt a traitor to David Owen, and knew he must leave this strange dreamer.]
Nick - Take a look around you at the world we've come to know, Does it seem to be much more than a crazy circus show? Maybe from the madness something beautiful will grow...