New Liberal Democrat Deputy Leader to be elected

Or to be more precise, a new Deputy Leader of the Liberal Democrat Parliamentary Party in the House of Commons is to be elected.

It is up to the party’s MPs to decide whether or not to elect a Deputy Leader, and Tim Farron has announced that:

In the last parliament, we didn’t have any women in our parliamentary party and we didn’t feel it was right to elect a deputy in those circumstances. But I wanted to revive the role as it gives the party another powerful voice and has helped give prominence to many of our notable MPs, including Ming Campbell, Simon Hughes and Vince Cable.

Now a third of our parliamentary party is female and we have our most diverse group of MPs ever, I feel our MPs form a more representative group to elect a deputy leader. There is still much more work needed to make ourselves more like the nation we seek to represent, but this is a really positive time for our party after increasing our number of MPs by 50%.

Nominations close 5pm Tuesday 20 June with, if required, hustings and voting on Tuesday 27 June.

UPDATE: The new Deputy Leader is Jo Swinson.