Hello, welcome to the special Saturday edition of Coffee House Shots. I'm James Hill. I'm

George Taylor, the MP for Bister, and Annabel Danham, who is the senior political commentator at the Daily Telegraph.

Now, Annabel, last week you wrote a piece asking, what exactly is the point of the Lib Dems?

Do you want to give us your take fully aware here that Callum opposite is the foreign affairs

spokesman for the Lib Dems?

To be clear, when I wrote the piece, I didn't know that I would subsequently be taking part

in a spectator TV discussion with a Liberal Democrat.

But no, I think, you know, I was prompted to write this by Ed Davies' very strong rhetoric around the US extraction of Nicola's Maduro and how that seemed to be a way, perhaps, if you were being cynical, for the lived ems to set themselves apart from the other political parties.

And I suppose the two questions I wanted to drill down into in my piece were,

first, should the Liberal Democrats be doing better than they are?

And there's a new poll this week, which has shown they are on around 12%

and the Greens have caught up with them.

So why is it that when there is such a sense of disillusionment with Labour and the Tories

that Lib Dems aren't performing better?

And second, what is it that the modern Liberal Democrat Party stands for?

Because to paraphrase Voltaire talking about the Holy Roman Empire, they don't seem to me

to be particularly liberal or particularly democratic when you look at their stance on Brexit.

And that really was the thrust of the piece and what I was looking at.

Calam, your response to that.

Well, I welcome the chance to have a right of reply. So thank you very much for offering that. Why don't we start where Anabel did with Venezuela? So the way I would think about that is actually that the other parties in British politics have moved away from what would have been a consensual position really not very long ago. So I don't see this as some kind of strident attempt by the Lib Dems differentiate ourselves.

Rather, we are holding to principles of international law, international order, the importance to the UK and to UK security and safety of having some semblance of playing by the rules.

And the way in which Donald Trump made no attempt to work with other partners, marched into

...