“I fought them in government, I’m fighting them now. They’re beyond the pale” – Ed Davey on the Conservatives

In a moving interview in The Guardian, Liberal Democrat leader Ed Davey talks about some of the challenges and tragedy he’s faced:

He describes a “relatively humble” background: his father from a mining family; his mother the daughter of domestic servants. … When he was four, and his brothers were nine (Charles) and seven (Henry), John Davey died of Hodgkin’s disease at the age of 37. “Diagnosed in November, he died in March. I didn’t really know him. When you’re young, you roll with it. The big thing was seeing my mother’s grief, hearing it, knowing something tragic had happened.” …

Three years on, she was diagnosed with secondary cancer in her bones. “Henry and I, with help from my maternal grandparents and neighbours, nursed Mum for three years,” he says. “The last 18 months she was bedridden, in a lot of pain. We had this morphine – I used to pour it out and give it to her in a cup.”…

“And then my grandad died when I was 18,” he says. “I was pretty angry about that, after all that had happened. It was quite sudden, a heart attack, he couldn’t have been that old, 66. I think he died of a broken heart. He’d lost his only child, who he adored. He was a very, very emotional man.”

On more political fare, Ed Davey is also very clear about the Conservatives:

Davey says he was fighting the Tories constantly [in coalition]: “I didn’t trust them an inch. I didn’t trust George Osborne an inch. We didn’t tell people how much we were fighting the Tories, that was by design, from Nick [Clegg]. He wanted to show that coalitions work. I argued that we should show the bit of the Liberals that’s anti-establishment, that’s reformist, that’s internationalist. But he was the leader. We served at his pleasure.”

You can read the full piece here.

UPDATE: A lovely response to the interview in The Guardian‘s letters pages:

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