Our members are very much maligned. Obviously the average age is 60 something, but they all have children and grandchildren, they understand what we need to do, they want to win.

For the most part our grassroots members are serious, nice, tolerant people.

We said in our 21st Century Party paper there are 61 mosaic groups, which the market research people use as different socio-economic categories and half of our members come from just five of those groups and that is very narrow - too narrow.

Our party believes in diversity, not uniformity.

Our party's committed to tackling failing schools and cutting crime.

You'd look around at meetings, and committee members who could have been his grandchildren wouldn't be there because of things like bad weather. But Porter never missed.