Lib Dems pick up £950,000 bequest

The BBC reports:

The Lib Dems have received their second biggest donation ever, from an academic who bequeathed the party £950,000.

George Watson, a former professor at Cambridge University and one time Lib Dem candidate, died in 2013, aged 86.

His gift was the single biggest sum reported in the Electoral Commission’s table of party donations for the third quarter of 2014.

Julian Huppert, MP for Cambridge, adds:

George Grimes Watson was a great thinker, an English don and a life-long liberal.

He stood for Parliament in 1959 in Cheltenham, unsuccessfully, and then became a Fellow at St John’s College Cambridge, where he became a noted scholar in literature, literary criticism and liberal political thought, including being a key member of the unservile state group, rethinking liberalism and welfare.

His 1959 campaign literature shows how little has changed, with one section saying ‘Liberals made them get rid of identity-cards – but the State Still has far too much power in our lives’, ‘The Home Secretary thinks the police ought to tap private phone-calls’ and ‘We need the European Common Market – Tory policy closes the door of Europe in our faces.’

“He was a deep thinker and a great liberal, and is much missed.