Former Lib Dem president Tim Farron made few friends by scoring his party’s general election campaign a ‘two out of 10’. His Christianity makes him a controversial candidate for the leadership – but could he be the ‘spiky, different’ man for the job?

The only surprise I could find in last week’s Lib Dem leadership drama was the fact that it didn’t come sooner. Last weekend, aides working for Tim Farron’s leadership rival Norman Lamb were caught privately polling party members with negative questions about his Christian beliefs. Lamb apologised to Farron, the aides resigned and everyone pretended to be mildly shocked by their unsporting conduct. But no one can have been genuinely amazed to see Farron’s faith become a factor in the race to become his party’s next leader.

Farron wasn’t. “One hopes for better among the Liberal Democrats, but of course I’m not surprised,” he says quietly. “In elections you can choose to play the man or the ball, and if you choose to play the man, you look for a perceived political weakness – and some people perceive my faith as a weakness. In the US, everyone has to invent a faith to get elected. Here you’re not allowed to have one. But my faith is my faith, and nothing is going to change that.”

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The MP for Westmorland and Lonsdale in Cumbria found God when he was 18. It was, he has said, “the most massive choice” he has ever made. Baptised at 21, he then lapsed somewhat in his 20s, before recommitting to Jesus when he turned 30. By any recognisable definition, he is a born-again evangelical Christian, but when I say so, he looks uncomfortable. “I don’t like labels. I just count myself as a Christian, and my faith is in Jesus Christ, I put my trust in Him. I count Him as my Lord and saviour, and I’m in no way ashamed of that.”

He is, however, conspicuously wary about defining the specifics of his faith: “I’m not deliberately like that, but I just expect it all to be misconstrued.” He says he can respect the argument that God does not exist, but has little patience with many contemporary Christians’ wishy-washy notions of a “half-baked, low-wattage, part-time God”. He prays every night, says grace before family meals (“We don’t call it that, we call it ‘saying prayers’”) and believes that God knows exactly how many hairs he has on his head.

Farron believes that everyone will go to either heaven or hell. “I think the Bible is clear. Everybody has something coming after.” As a non-believer, will I go to hell? “Well, it’s not for me to make that judgment. It’s a real cop-out, this one, but Abraham says: ‘Will not the judge of all things do right?’ And at the end, no one will disagree with the justice of what God has done.”

I ask if he consulted God when considering whether to stand for the party leadership. “Of course you do, of course you do. Obviously you ask for His guidance.” Does he think God has a plan for him? “I think He has a plan for everybody.” I’m not sure what that means. “Well, God is sovereign. Dreadful things happen in this world, but that reminds us that we need a saviour. I don’t go round fixating that God has some major plan for me. Maybe his plan is for me to lose a bunch of elections and be humbled. God’s plan could be that some pretty brutal things happen to you. But the one thing I fall back on is that God’s overall plan is good.”

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God notwithstanding (Lamb’s position is agnostic), the differences between the two leadership candidates are so modest that a Lib Dem website recently posted four quotes from the two contenders and invited readers to guess who said what. I misattributed all four, needless to say, and wonder if Farron considers their interchangeability a good or bad thing. “Well, I guess it kind of proves the point that politically there probably isn’t a right lot between us.”

So what is the difference? “I think it’s probably about whether you’ve got the skills to rebuild the party. Can we rebuild a movement? Can we inspire people, and get them to give us a second chance?” He seems to be saying that the contest is all about personality instead of politics, but blanches slightly when I put it like that. “Umm, maybe. But it’s about what you can do. We need to understand that we spent five years being derided, and we’re going to spend five years now being ignored. And so I think the problem we’ve got is the Oscar Wilde quote – the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about. So this is the challenge to the leader, and I think I’m the guy for the job, to speak in a way and resonate with people in a way that gets us talked about. We need to be spiky, different, human.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Tim Farron (left) and Lembit Opik in London in 2007. Photograph: Rebecca Reid/PA

This analysis would certainly play to Farron’s strengths. His personal style is incorrigibly jaunty, to the point of Tiggerish; he smiles incessantly, loves football, and admits to having smoked cannabis (“at university”). A father of four from a working-class northern background, he spends his spare time “watching music on YouTube”, and if peppering sentences with “flippin’” and “bloomin’” counts as being human, then he meets his own brief. But I remember Ed Miliband’s early fans boasting about his ability to “speak human”, and in the end everyone worried more about his ability to be prime ministerial. “Anyone could be prime ministerial once they are prime minister,” Farron shoots back smartly, before conceding that no one believed this rule applied to Miliband. “No, I suppose it’s a good point.” Might the same concern not apply in Farron’s case?

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“OK, well, so. Charles Kennedy gave me plenty of advice over the years. And the best bit was: ‘Be yourself.’” For Farron, 45, this includes wearing Doc Martens at all times, a footwear choice that invariably features in the mutterings of critics who cast him as a student politician, the type who probably has a Che Guevara poster in his bedroom. “But I’ve worn them for years!” protests Farron. Would he wear them at the Cenotaph? “I might,” he begins, before breaking off suspiciously. “Is this my Michael Foot moment?” Of course, I laugh. “Well, I’ll make sure they’re polished. There you go.”

The more serious question mark over Farron’s leadership qualities concerns his time as party president from 2011 to 2014. He was not offered a job by Nick Clegg in the new coalition government in 2010, and admits, “I would have loved to have been a minister.” He protests a little too much when insisting he nonetheless didn’t mind. “The point is, I didn’t make the cut, and you know, you kind of think, fine, I understand Nick’s got to make tough choices, and there’s no point sulking.” So he decided to run for party president instead.

“I was already getting angry. Not with the party,” he adds hastily. “Just with circumstances that, you know – we weren’t getting our message across. And I thought, you know what? I could be that critical voice. I could be a critical friend of the coalition.”

While his party was in government, Farron voted against the tuition fee rise and the bedroom tax, provoking a senior party member to confide to a reporter, “Which bit of the sanctimonious, God-bothering, treacherous little shit is there not to like?” Just weeks before this year’s election, he scandalised colleagues by scoring his party’s handling of coalition politics a headline-catching two out of 10. “It wasn’t at all helpful,” Vince Cable despaired coldly. “You know, he’s an entertaining speaker and has a bit of a fanclub. But I suspect he would not be seen as a very credible leader.” Paddy Ashdown was equally withering: “Judgment is not his strong suit”.

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Farron keeps smiling frantically as I remind him of these comments. “Well, I don’t think I was a critic most of the time. I was very loyal. I stood by Nick, I defended him.” For that matter, he thinks his party would have suffered an even heavier defeat in May had he not made a public stand against certain policies. “Well, I’ve had people say that to me. That’s certainly what the membership would feel.” Regarding the “two out of 10” score, however, he is more sheepish. “I think I said that I would give us eight out of 10 for policy, and two out of 10 for politics. And when you are resting on 8% in the polls – which we were at that point – it’s hard to say I was wrong.” But he wishes he hadn’t said it. He was, he admits, “a silly so–and-so” and “a bit of a wombat” not to realise that the “eight out of 10” half of the quote would not be widely reported.

Farron showers Clegg in praise. When the former leader considered resigning last year, Farron urged him not to. “I felt that only one person could lead us into the election, and that was Nick. I would not have been a candidate. I had no desire to do it at that point. I could see that other people would not have been able to restrain themselves, and the last thing we needed was a bloodbath before the election. There would have been a contest, not a coronation of anybody.”

The two have spoken five or six times since the general election, and if Farron wins the leadership race, he would like Clegg to be part of his team. He intends to do away with the title “shadow ministerial team”, because “I think it is both pompous and just really foolish to wander around pretending that you’re the shadow government when you’ve got eight MPs.” Instead, he plans to appoint a small team of spokespeople covering the most important departments, and pursue a strategy of dominating key policy areas.

The parliamentary arithmetic leaves him little choice, but isn’t the strategy in danger of demoting the Lib Dems to the status of protest party? “We’ve got to demand a place and be audacious in the centre of British politics, whilst not wasting our time.” One policy he hopes to seize control of will be the new cross-party interest in proportional representation; he is already in talks with other parties, and concedes that he has Ukip to thank for illuminating the iniquity of a first-past-the-post system that rewarded 4m votes for Nigel Farage’s party with one seat. Does that make Farage a force for good in British politics? “Ha ha ha. Well … discuss. Yes, I mean.”

Parliamentary arithmetic also dictates that to honour his promise of a 50%-female team, Farron will have to make most of his appointments in the Lords. Given his party’s disapproval of the powers of unelected peers this is, he agrees, ironic. “It is. But it’s where we are. You’ve got to pick yourself up where you are and go for it.” Diversity is more important, he argues, than democratic fastidiousness.

“I actually think diversity and gender balance is about more than just getting women selected and then doing the mechanics, though that is important. You have to proactively immerse yourself in and around people who are different from you. The problem is that too many people in this place just get advised by people who are just like them, so there’s groupthink, and they have no sense of what it’s like out there.” Is he talking about his predecessor? “Nick was no worse at this than his predecessors.”

On 16 July, Farron will almost certainly become the Lib Dems’ new leader. I am not alone in finding this state of affairs somewhat surprising, but the seeds of his success were almost certainly the same that sowed his party’s destruction. If, as he says, the party sealed its fate when it agreed to treble tuition fees, his decision to vote against the rise has also turned out to have been the launchpad for his leadership bid. That Farron’s future power should owe so much to his party’s bêtes noires – tuition fees, Ukip and the Lords – might suggest that God indeed moves in mysterious ways. Farron references tuition fees so frequently that I can see why his critics accuse him of having used the last parliament as a vehicle for his own ambitions, but he shakes his head.

“This is a really peculiar thing to say when you’re standing for the leadership of the party – but I’ve never been all that personally ambitious.”