Nick Cohen Nick Cohen

Tim Farron is a reminder of what it actually means to be liberal

The media complain about ‘career politicians’. Yet when politicians come along who aren’t Oxford PPEists, who have progressed via think tanks and spadships to safe seats without their feet touching the ground, journalists are shocked by their failure to conform to contemporary mores.

We want politicians to be different, it seems, as long as they stay the same. Tim Farron is that rarity in modern life: a senior politician from the north of England. The north has become the British equivalent of America’s flyover states, lost in the no-man’s land between the centres of real power in London and Edinburgh. Farron did not leave it until he came to Westminster. He was born in Preston, and educated at Runshaw College in Leyland and Newcastle University. He worked as a teacher in Lancaster and Ambleside before becoming MP for Westmorland and Lonsdale. He is also an evangelical Christian.

There was a time when no one who knew the North would be surprised. The Lake District farmhouse where I spent my childhood holidays appeared as cut off from modernity as it was possible to be. At the back of Skiddaw and on the edge of the edge of the Solway Plain, it was even too far away from the Lake District’s hiking centres for anyone except the most eccentric walkers to visit. The television rarely worked because the fells blocked the signal, and we could play in the single-track road by the farm gates without worrying about the traffic.

Yet the farmer and his wife had more chapels than shops to visit, and did not raise an eyebrow when their daughters went off to do missionary work in countries the most sophisticated metropolitans had barely heard of. They could go from a rural backwater and tour the world because they were doing the Lord’s work.

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