Published: 7:51 AM June 16, 2017 Updated: 8:45 AM September 18, 2020

No wonder they kicked the poor bugger out of politics.

Naturally, as a man of ill-concealed principle and conviction, Tim Farron was always likely to come a cropper in a game as flea-pit filthy as politics.

That was why we liked him.

It helped that he was also the only politician to see that democracy was not a one-off event on June 23, 2016, and that people could (and should) change their minds about Brexit.

But mainly we liked him because he was so honest. A bit goofy, a bit odd, but more than a bit sincere.

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He holds plenty of views we don't like, and he is being castigated by many on social media and elsewhere for allowing Christian beliefs to get in the way of his politics. But that's the opposite of what he tried to do.

What he tried, so earnestly, to do was put those personal religious views to one side and instead put forward a set of political ideas that offered a clear alternative to the rest of his colleagues in the Commons (most of whom felt as he did but had a more prized skill; the ability to turn their principles on a sixpence).

Tim Farron didn't fit because cynical duplicity and message-making has become the stock in trade of your average British politician.

The media – broadcast media in particular with their obsession for the 'gotcha moment' as Mathew Hulbert calls it in his defence of Farron, above – found it all too easy to pursue him for a suspected hidden agenda. The truth was he didn't hide it well enough.

Honest, direct, sincere, open, well-meaning and selfless.

No wonder they eventually kicked the poor bugger out.

Matt Kelly, editor