{"id":79,"date":"2006-01-28T17:41:31","date_gmt":"2006-01-28T17:41:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.campbellcampaign.org\/2006\/01\/28\/welcome-to-sir-cyril-townsend-former-conservative-mp-for-bexleyheath\/"},"modified":"2006-01-28T19:52:32","modified_gmt":"2006-01-28T19:52:32","slug":"welcome-to-sir-cyril-townsend-former-conservative-mp-for-bexleyheath","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.mingcampbell.org.uk\/ccarchive\/2006\/01\/28\/welcome-to-sir-cyril-townsend-former-conservative-mp-for-bexleyheath\/","title":{"rendered":"Welcome to Sir Cyril Townsend"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Welcome to Sir Cyril Townsend who served as Conservative MP for Bexleyheath from 1974 to 1997 and who, earlier today, announced that has joined the Liberal Democrats.<\/p>\n<p>Sir Cyril attended the first of the Hustings meetings in Plymouth at the weekend, and met Sir Ming Campbell, pledging his personal support.<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>David Cameron was the author of Michael Howard&#8217;s illiberal manifesto just last May.   If he believed what he wrote then, how can he believe what he says now?   And since he voted for the US invasion of Iraq, and has been continually Eurosceptic, what right has he to our respect for his international intentions?<\/p>\n<p>I am supporting Ming Campbell&#8217;s campaign to lead the Liberal Democrats &#8211; who I joined last year &#8211; because I admire his consistency and integrity, and I believe his distinct radical liberalism would be a breath of fresh air in British politics.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>Given that the Conservatives and the media made a big thing a few days ago about the defection of a little-known Liberal Democrat parliamentary candidate who came third in West Suffolk earlier this year,  I wonder how they will react to the loss of someone who served for 23 years as a Conservative in the House of Commons?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Welcome to Sir Cyril Townsend who served as Conservative MP for Bexleyheath from 1974 to 1997 and who, earlier today, announced that has joined the Liberal Democrats. Sir Cyril attended the first of the Hustings meetings in Plymouth at the weekend, and met Sir Ming Campbell, pledging his personal support. David Cameron was the author [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-79","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.mingcampbell.org.uk\/ccarchive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.mingcampbell.org.uk\/ccarchive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.mingcampbell.org.uk\/ccarchive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.mingcampbell.org.uk\/ccarchive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.mingcampbell.org.uk\/ccarchive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=79"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.mingcampbell.org.uk\/ccarchive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.mingcampbell.org.uk\/ccarchive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=79"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.mingcampbell.org.uk\/ccarchive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=79"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.mingcampbell.org.uk\/ccarchive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=79"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}