Last week I was on the train heading up to Guildford for a special opportunity to meet Tim Farron, potential leader of the Lib Dems. As I travelled I was nervous as any young party member would be. I was about to meet my first real big name in politics, someone who had taken his place in Parliament, someone who had sat on BBC Question Time, someone who had played the political game against numerous reds and blues. But what I did not expect was the passion I was going to feel after this meeting.

Tim spoke as he did a few days later after winning the candidacy about a new type of liberalism he wanted to introduce. This new type of liberalism was less a theoretical frame work but more an emotion and rejuvenation of what being Liberal meant. He coined this new experience, Gut Liberalism.

So what is Gut Liberalism?

Gut Liberalism, as Tim explained, was about reconnecting the political feeling back to liberal ideals. As Liberals we tend to pride ourselves on being rational rather then being emotionally driven. We often come to compromises and though we can be enthralled by our beliefs, we tend to often keep them within us so not to become driven blindly with our beliefs.

But the side effect of this is that it is hard to get others excited about our approach and sometimes, as we saw with the 2015 election, we lose our identity. People didn’t know what we stood for in that election, they couldn’t feel any drive inside, any sense of will. People lost the drive in the party and this meant over the last few years we have drifted.

I believe, like Tim, that we need to refine that balance of rationality of ideas but also find a way to connect people passionately to those same ideas. Connect people back to the feeling of wanting to shout those ideas from the roofs. We need to start from the door step when voters open the door and see us. We need to be able to show them an identity, a feeling straight away, because only then will we have grasped their attention.

Tim explained in his speech about the lessons we can learn from the last election. One of these lessons that hailed a few murmurs from the crowed listening, was taking a lesson from Nigel Farage’s books in the sense of saying things that come from the gut. Saying and delivering ideas that make people want to get up and get involved. Now these do not always have to be radical ideas, but they do have to mean something to people. I believe this is the key to Lib Dems rebuilding. As I said earlier the party needs to mean something to people on the door step. People need to feel what we stand for not in the head but in the heart.

I felt that was Tim Farron’s speech is a means to end. Now Gut Liberalism will by no means get us all the way into 10 Downing Street. But it will get us into the minds and more importantly into the hearts of voters. If we can do that with time people will engage, people will respond and Liberalism and Liberal Democrats will have regained the lost ground and be able to make the changes to build that fairer society.

For me Tim’s message was the first time in a while I felt that strength again, the idea that we can fight and we can win, but we’ve got to get others to believe it. This could be the start of something, a new Liberal Democrat with bite. A new Gut Liberalism.

* Nicholas Belfitt studied politics and international relations and joined the Lib Dems in 2014. He blogs at Liberal Ramblings.