Warning: this is long. Very long. It’s 5 pages in Word.

Let’s start with a full disclosure. This was my ballot in 2015.

Now, if you don’t like what I’m going to say, you can happily skip off and talk about me being a meanie anti-Christian/uppity gay/bigoted right-winger. I’ve also made an effort to not swear so much, because the last time I was this angry and wrote something I got complaints.

This whole Tim Farron thing has been a two year disaster, from beginning to end. That shouldn’t be a controversial opinion.* From the beginning of his leadership mutterings, it’s been A Thing; the elephant in the room. My girlfriend joined mid-coalition, and isn’t on a lot of our inner boards. When it came to the leadership election, she was more fervently anti-Tim than me: she didn’t trust him.

So, yes. It has been a disaster. A disaster of his own making, mostly.

It should not ever have been a surprise that a variation of “is Tim a homophobe?” would be a question asked. The fact that it was speaks volumes about how badly prepared the Farron campaign were, and how they doubled down instead of learning. I remember the Liberal Youth campaign for SSM; I remember there being talk of the exec sitting down with certain MPs to make sure they didn’t vote against it; I remember Tim Farron’s name coming up.**

TIM FARRON’S TEAM SHOULD HAVE BEEN PREPARED.

Instead, they doubled down. If you brought up any doubts, you were an anti-christian bigot. You were conducting personal attacks. The LGBT+ members of Farron’s inner circle would imply that you were a) not clever enough to realise the nuance of Farron’s position, b) clearly just a dirty right-winger who hates the Lib Dems, and c) not a real/good gay.***

I’ve also discovered THIS MORNING that Farron’s team thought a good way of dealing with this was sending aggressive DMs to members of the Young Liberals that disagreed or questioned him.**** When your campaigning tactics are to harass LGBT+ YOUTH instead of questioning why they’re asking this, then you’ve stepped over the line. Please stick this screenshot to your forehead:

I’m getting off track.

Instead of doubling down, Farron and his team instead chose to ignore it. And, clearly, not just publicly. Otherwise they would have come up with an answer.

Obviously, they didn’t. And Cathy Newman happened. And a lot of people quit the party.

— Actually, before I go on, I saw a lot of people leave the party over the whole Farron thing at the beginning, and it wasn’t just because of the gay thing. There did feel like a concerted effort from a certain group to ‘get our party back’ and chase out everyone who wasn’t in the right quadrant of the Political Compass. I was there. I saw it. They honed their tactics on right-wingers to practice them on the gays later. —

As an LGBT+ young person, it was pretty excruciating, but whatever. I don’t even remember if we got an answer from him that time (I’m going to assume no), but that was it. People had scented blood, they’d found a weak spot, and thousands of young LGBT+ people watched with a sickening feeling.

And Tim did not learn.

Tim’s team did not learn.

Are you keeping count? That’s twice the issue was brought up, and twice the team were unprepared. It’s not good enough. It wasn’t then, and isn’t now.

And because I like constructive criticism: my answer, if I was Tim (my foul mouth, bra size, and habit of falling for any gender if they’ve got pretty eyes says otherwise) would be: “a sin? Pffffft, no more than anyone else. I mean, I’m pretty sure nobody growing up in the 80s will go to heaven, with all of those mixed fibres.”

So we ignore it and keep going. Brexit happens and it hurts, and Farron’s ability to vocalise that wins us members.

There’s a weird moment where Farronites say that no other party leader has had a standing ovation mid-speech, which is a blatant lie (at least, I hope it is, otherwise I hallucinated other people doing it and must have looked very weird), but we go on.

Then Theresa May goes for a walk and decides to cancel all the holidays of every political campaigner.*****

And then the shit begins.

With a sickening feeling, it dawns on every Lib Dem that, actually… Tim hasn’t prepared. That he’s decided that our bird of liberty is an ostrich, and he’s going to befriend the sand. It dawns on us all that he doesn’t have an answer.

And that, right there? That’s where it starts to become willful. And unforgivable.

We have weeks of this. Weeks of hopeless watching as Tim systematically dismantles our excellent history on LGBT rights, and how he squirms uncomfortably when the question is asked.

— My answer, piggybacking on my last one, would have been “please stop asking me about sex I have a very visual imagination and won’t be able to look Brian Paddick in the eye for a very long time.” —

This is where the LGBT+ Farronites take the lead. They write blogs and go on crusades to prove that Tim’s not a homophobe – “I’m gay, and he’s my friend! He once shook the hand of a lesbian, checkmate athetits!” They’re the vocal campaigners here.******

And, yes, I did too. I love this party, it has changed my life, and I fundamentally believe in a place where no one is enslaved by conformity. If a friend came to ask me, I told them my honest opinion – that maybe I didn’t trust Farron, but I did trust my friends. I trusted the Lib Dems. I was a member of Liberal Youth when we made the decision to not campaign for anyone who voted against SSM. I trusted the party to do the right thing.

All of this is basically a really long introduction to what happened next.

Brian Paddick resigned, citing issues with some of the leadership’s views. We all took this to be an issue with Tim’s beliefs on homosexuality.

And then we all went to hell in a handcart.

—

* Yes, he’s done good things. But if anti-Nick and anti-Norman people don’t have to weigh the good and the bad, I’m not doing it for Tim.

** I’ve spoken to sources who say they’re not sure if these meetings actually happened. But it was VERY clear that we were scared we couldn’t rely on Tim for this.

*** Quick PSA: if you start your reasoning with “well I hold XYZ posts and I am A Known Gay”, you are calling those that disagree with you bad gays. “The Chair of the LGBTLDs disagrees with you” suggests that I’m wrong in my opinion, and I’m wrong to feel unsafe.

**** The member of Tim’s team I spoke to said that this wasn’t from his campaign. The people getting the DMs have said they were from Tim and his top team, and that he’s got form in DMing people he doesn’t agree with. Unfortunately, screenshots were not taken.

***** This has no relation to anything here, but I just like telling this story. I was on a plane home from Gibraltar the day it was called. Set off, nothing exciting happened. Switched my phone on after I got back… it was like a movie!

****** Whilst I hold a great amount of distrust for a lot of Farronite campaigners now, the fact that LGBT+ folk had to assume the emotional labour because Farron could not get his head in the game makes my blood boil.

[Part 2 will be linked here when I’ve finished. This was getting too long and I needed to make sure I had screenshots and back ups of everything. It’s… a tougher piece.]