Tim Farron admires Tony Blair and believes the Lib Dems are now the only party that can throw the Conservatives out of power because Jeremy Corbyn is such a poor leader, he has told the Guardian.

The Lib Dem leader says the former Labour prime minister should be remembered for winning elections as well as for taking Britain to war in Iraq. The statements show Farron is on a deliberate charm offensive to win over Labour voters disillusioned by the party’s move to the left under Corbyn.

Asked whether he admired Blair, Farron said: “Yes I do. Blair in three chapters – the final chapter is post 9/11, where breathtaking foolishness after foolishness, hubris and something that diminished Britain in the world, cost the lives of thousands of innocent people and misled the country. What he did was unspeakable.



“But let’s look at the first two chapters, where he built an opposition that could beat the Tories. Then when he brought in minimum wage, tax credits, schools, devolution.” He added: “I think being a person who thinks winning elections so you can do good is honourable.”

Farron said he hoped to learn lessons from the former Labour prime minister as he seeks to rebuild the Liberal Democrats’ electability after they were all but wiped out in last year’s general election, leaving them with just eight MPs.



The Lib Dems gather in Brighton for their annual conference this weekend, after an extraordinary political year in which Farron has been the only party leader who has not quit or been challenged. By contrast, he described Corbyn as “the worst opposition leader in living memory”, and accused the Labour leader of failing to hold Theresa May’s government to account.

Tony Blair is greeted by children in Basra, Iraq, in May 2003. Photograph: Stefan Rousseau/AP

Farron said Corbyn was a decent man, but added:“I think he and his movement are potentially going to be responsible for landing us with a Tory government for the next quarter of a century.

“If you care about people on low incomes, if you care about refugees, if you care about tackling climate change, if you care about the fact that the NHS is chronically underfunded, about divisions, lack of opportunity, failure to maximise potential in the north, then backing a leadership which is going to fail to stand up for any of those causes is utterly reprehensible.

“He is the worst opposition leader in living memory – he makes [former Tory leader] Iain Duncan Smith look like a class act.”

He added that he also admired Ruth Davidson, the charismatic leader of the Scottish Conservatives, who took her party into second place in May’s Holyrood elections. “In particular [I admire] that she acknowledged the space in the market for a decent opposition,” he said.

Long regarded as the most ardently pro-European party in British politics, the Lib Dems have pledged to do everything they can to campaign for Britain to remain in the EU and hope to win support from voters who regret the result of June’s referendum.



Ruth Davidson, leader of the Scottish Conservatives. Photograph: Murdo Macleod/The Guardian

He told the Guardian he believed the Lib Dems could challenge the Conservatives in constituencies, including those they once held in the West Country,where a leftwing Labour party is likely to struggle.

“The only plausible route for the Conservatives to lose their majority at the next election is Liberal Democrats gaining seats, not just in the West Country, but that would be part of it. There is no route for the Labour party to gain seats of any kind, and certainly there is no business model at all for a Labour majority – even under a moderate, electable leader.”

Voters punished the Lib Dems for their decision to enter coalition with David Cameron – and in particular for backing increases in student tuition fees, which they had promised during the election campaign to reject.

But Farron said he hoped the party could “do a Trudeau” and emulate the Canadian prime minister, Justin Trudeau, whose Liberal party beat the official opposition in last year’s election. Failing that, Farron aspires to repeat the success of one of his predecessors, Lord Ashdown, in rebuilding Lib Dem support.

“I’ve been serious about us shaping up and doing a Trudeau, but the minimum we can do is an Ashdown – in other words take a swath of seats that the Tories can’t lose to anyone else and that is the only plausible route arithmetically of getting rid of a Tory government,” he said.

“Labour are not going to take 100 seats, there may be one seat on boundaries, maybe a seat in Scotland, but that’s your lot, but it looks to me we could make gains and take Conservatives into minority territory.”

Asked whether he could ever see the Lib Dems going into coalition with the Conservatives again, Farron said there were “all sorts of different options”.

He first encountered May when the pair stood against each other in the safe Labour seat of Durham in 1992, and recalled her as “very competent, very serious, very businesslike”.

But he said she had faced few major choices at the Home Office, and the lack of a credible opposition could tempt her to lurch to the populist right.

“The grammar [schools] stuff says quite a bit about what she’s really like. Maybe she is too influenced by spin doctors – that’s a very short-termist policy for someone who is usually more grown up than that.” He added that the Conservatives could now become a “government fuelled by the hubris of not having a proper opposition”.