But I'm not interested in politics. I lose interest the microsecond it ceases to be emotional, when something becomes a political movement. What I'm interested in is emotions.

Politics is a highly tribal business.

You have a political and media elite who have an idiom by which they describe politics. It's highly, highly polarised. It's right, left, red, blue, up, down, victorious, crushed.

I didn't become leader to transform the Liberal Democrats into an enlarged form of the Electoral Reform Society. It's not the be all and end all for us. There are other very, very key ambitions in politics, not least social mobility and life chances, that I care about as passionately if not more.

I have got instincts that, I think, are very much in tune with people's very keen sense to see something different. I did not dream of being in politics since I was knee-high to a grasshopper. I was not involved in student politics, or not in that partisan way.