Perhaps a few short hours spent in the beautiful surroundings of the Hay Festival might make one forget that we are in the middle of a general election campaign. Not a chance. The sun shone and the tea and cake flowed, but an encounter with a typically informed Hay audience is as testing as any on the doorstep or TV studio.
With the country deeply unsettled by the uncertainty created by last year’s vote to leave the European Union, the future of British politics was very much up for discussion at the festival – as it is across the country.
I first spoke at Hay seven years ago, just a few months after the formation of the Coalition government. So much has happened since. Politics: Between the Extremes, my account of the Liberal Democrats’ time in power with the Conservatives and the dilemmas faced by the politics of reason and moderation, was written with the hope that it would challenge traditional thinking about the way we conduct politics in this country and how to defeat the scourge of populism.
The audience at Hay had clearly been putting their minds to the task, and following an enjoyable Q&A with Matthew d’Ancona I was put through a round of occasionally confrontational, frequently optimistic and always intelligent questions. They were the type of questions that leave me confident that there is a future for reasoned, thoughtful, small ‘l’ liberal politics in this country – within all parties and none.