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For me at the heart of government to being briefly his party's only MP in Scotland.

It's been quite a journey for my guest on political thinking this week, Alistair Carmichael,

as Deputy Chief Whip in the coalition years, he helped his leader Nick Clegg and David

Cameron to get their program through Parliament. As Scottish Secretary during the independence

referendum, he took the fight to Alex Seventh. Now he's the Lib Dem's longest serving MP.

In his time in Parliament, the party has gone from being a party of protest to a party of

power to... now what? Alistair Carmichael, welcome to Political Thinking.

Hello there and thank you for having me. A party of liberal ideas just for the avoidance

effect. Ah, the answer is there. The reason I only posed the question in that way was

I was struck this week when there were tributes to that remarkable woman, Shirley Williams.

As well as the personal tributes, there were a lot of political reflections on what might

have been, not just for her, but is it worth your brand of politics? Putting it crudely,

what went wrong? Well, I think it was in a public that said that all political careers

ended in failure and you know, that's something that we're all sensible if we bid in

mind politics is never easy and I don't think things have gone wrong. We've certainly

not gone as well as I would have wanted it electrically, but there's more to politics than

the electoral success and you know, you gently put the question there that I get quite a

lot of commentators asked me, what is the point of the liberal Democrats? And you've seen

that just in the last couple of weeks with the debate around COVID passports, for example,

something which if you really drill down into it, you see is actually about quite fundamental

redefining of that relationship between the citizen and the state, the individual and

...