Andrew had a long career in the party, including working for Vince Cable in Twickenham and Lynne Featherstone in Hornsey & Wood Green and stewarding at party conferences, before becoming the party’s Deputy Director for Scotland. Andrew was always one of the happiest and kindest people on the campaigns I worked with him on, and never let the occasional inevitable moments of stress or tension sour personal friendships. He had also in recent years become a keen runner for charity.

Three disparate memories stick in my mind about Andrew. One was the middle of a local election campaign when due to a farcical breakdown in communications he was inside a locked building out of touch and I had to get some urgent information to him. The solution? Remotely logging in to one of the printers in the building and printing out a letter to him. It caught him a bit unawares when a printer sprung to life and churned out a piece of paper starting ‘Dear Andrew…’

The second was Andrew’s improbably ability to keep his shirts perfectly ironed all through the day. No matter how many tips I asked him to pass on, my shirts have never got even close to his levels of sartorial elegance.

The third was the pleasure of attending his civic partnership just a few months ago, and the chance to meet for the first time his long-term partner Roger. (See Andrew’s lovely post here.) Andrew was always very good at keeping work and private lives separate, so much so that several of using going were joking in advance whether or not Roger really existed…

It was lovely seeing Roger and Andrew together for the first – and tragically last – time in a beautiful setting on the Firth of Forth.

Andrew will be much missed for many reasons by the large number of people he helped, he entertained, he encouraged, he supported and he loved.

My thoughts are with Roger and Andrew’s relatives.

Hereward Cooke, a hugely popular Norwich priest and former leader of Norwich City Council’s Liberal Democrat group, has died while at the Copenhagen climate change conference.

The Bishop of Norwich, the Rt Revd Graham James, announced with great regret the unexpected and sudden death of the Revd Canon Cooke.

He died in his sleep at the age of 70…

In 2000, Hereward became involved in local politics as city councillor for the Lakenham ward and went on to be leader of the Liberal Democrat group on the city council.

He retired in 2008 and in 2009 he moved with his wife, Diana, to Blakeney where he continued to minister and took up the role of diocesan environmental officer.

He won respect  not just within the Liberal Democrats for his work but also from across the political spectrum, including Conservatives such as Trevor Ivory.

Ralf Dahrendorf, who has died at the age of 80, crowded several careers, in Germany and Britain, into a single life.

First a leading academic sociologist, then a rising Liberal German politician, director of the London School of Economics and later warden of St Antony’s College, Oxford, he combined political engagement and intellectual debate. He was successively a German minister, a European commissioner and a British peer. He was a European public intellectual; the author of nearly 30 books, and a long-standing columnist for Die Zeit and La Repubblica as well as for English and French media. Yet he was never entirely comfortable in any of those posts, except at the LSE; he was instinctively a liberal dissenter who enjoyed questioning the ruling consensus, whatever it might be.

You can read the full piece here.