Yesterday on the Sunday Politics, Tim Farron and Iain Duncan Smith went head to head. The former Tory leader is no longer the quiet man. He spent much of the interview muttering over Tim, telling him he was talking “utter rubbish.” It was the sort of aggressive sneering that would be more at home at a Trump rally.

Despite all that, Tim did really well. He made his point that it would be a massive mistake to leave the single market. He said that it was vital that the eventual deal was put to the British people and cited Lord Kerr’s backing of that position. You can’t, he said, start off a process with democracy and end it with a stitch up. We didn’t vote to leave the single market.

He added that the Government had chosen to listen to the “siren voices of English nationalism” in the Tory Party and not the pragmatic wishes of business, accusing them of “theft of the result” to impose a hard brexit that nobody voted for.

Andrew Neil confronted him with the news that former Liberal Democrat peer Zahida Manzoor  had joined the Conservatives. Tim said that he found her decision peculiar but pointed to our 18 council gains and 20,000 members since June as evidence that the party was recovering.

He could have gone to town on that decision a bit more. It actually goes to show the need to be a great deal more careful about who gets peerages and whether they actually share our values. It is incredible that someone who sat on our benches can feel comfortable joining  the party that came out with that nasty display of xenophobic nationalism at their conference last week. I doubt we’ll get much chance in the foreseeable future to put anyone else in the Lords but we do need to learn lessons from this. There has to be some level of party approval and accountability.

You can watch the whole 11 minute exchange here on the Sunday Politics website.

* Caron Lindsay is Editor of Liberal Democrat Voice and blogs at Caron’s Musings