After a fairly disastrous general election campaign, Tim Farron has quit as leader of the Liberal Democrats. You can see why: he wanted to pose as the champion of Remain yet for for the first few weeks he seemed unable to move the conversation beyond his views on gay sex and marijuana. His attempt to rekindle the Brexit wars was a complete flop.
The LibDems are an unlikely alliance of evangelical Christians and social liberals, and Farron’s appointment embodied a clash that the media delighted in exposing. He said, today, that has decided that the two are impossible to reconcile: “I have found myself torn, living as a faithful Christian and leading a political party in the current environment.” He didn’t elaborate, but I assume he’s admitting that as an evangelical Christian he does hold some unfashionable views on sexuality – hence his struggling with the secular inquisition he faced when the campaign started.
“A better, wiser person than me may have been able to deal with this more successfully, to have remained faithful to Christ while leading a political party.”
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