Every year Tim Farron has a habit of leaving a perfectly curled turd on his Leader’s lawn on the eve of their party conference. This year he has not disappointed and it comes in the form of a snivelling love-in with Ed Miliband:

“I really like Ed Miliband, so I don’t want to diss him. I don’t want join in with the Tories who compare him to Kinnock. First of all, he’s a polite and nice person. I think he is somebody who is genuinely of the Robin Cook wing of the Labour Party, from their perspective what you’d call the ‘soft left’. Somebody who is not a Luddite on environmental issues, somebody who’s open minded about modernising our democracy, somebody who’s instinctively a bit more pluralistic than most Labour leaders and a bit more internationalist as well. And they’re other things too. For all that I think he could have done a lot more on the AV campaign, he did at least have the backbone to come out and back it.”

What could possibly be super, super loyal Tim’s motivation for love-bombing Ed? Guido shudders at the thought of those two in a Rose Garden…

UPDATE: It hasn’t always been so cringe-inducingly cute between Tim and Ed. Back before he was planning for the future Farron was only too happy to accuse Miliband of “mere opportunism” over lobbying reform and, pretty brutally by his standards, “increasingly desperate attempts to work out what he actually stands for”. How times change.