Advantage Tory right as Huhne exits stage left

So farewell then, Chris Huhne – well for the time being at any rate, as the erstwhile Energy Secretary quits in order to fight charges of perverting the course of justice in relation to a driving offence committed in 2003.

The leading Liberal Democrat politician was left with no choice but to resign from the Cabinet yesterday after effectively being charged with lying to the police over whether he or his ex-wife was driving at the time of the incident.

Mr Huhne, who continues to deny the charges, will now have to clear his name if he is to stand any chance of resuming what has been an eventful career over the course of less than seven years as an MP.

For now, though, his Lib Dem colleagues will have to manage without his combative presence around the Cabinet table as the curse that has seemed to bedevil the party’s senior figures since the last election strikes again.

They lost their cleverest minister, David Laws, within 16 days of the Coalition taking office, and nearly lost their most well-known, Vince Cable, over his ill-judged pledge to destroy the Murdoch empire – uttered before it succeeded in destroying itself.

Now they have lost their most abrasive in Mr Huhne, the stoutest defender of the party’s interests within the government and, by some distance, the Tory backbenches’ least-favourite Liberal Democrat.

Few Tory tears will be shed at his departure. Right-wing internet bloggers who have had Mr Huhne in their sights for some time were literally cracking open the champagne yesterday morning – and one even posted a video of himself doing so.

The evident Tory glee demonstrates the fact that Mr Huhne’s enforced resignation is likely significantly to alter the balance of power within the Cabinet in their favour.

His successor Ed Davey is a capable minister who deserves his Cabinet promotion - but he is no Chris Huhne, described by one commentator yesterday as a “political bulldozer who would try relentlessly to get his way, and who was not averse to media shenanigans to advance his cause.”

It was Mr Huhne, rather than Nick Clegg, who led the attack on the Tories over their handling of the referendum on the voting system last May, when Mr Cameron gave the green light for a series of bitter personal attacks against the Lib Dem leader.

And it was he who articulated the Lib Dem rage over Mr Cameron’s decision to veto a new EU treaty at the Brussels summit in December.

What gave Mr Huhne a particular degree of authority within the Cabinet was his strong power base within the party as a two-time leadership contender and de facto leader of the party’s social democratic tendency.

He could very well have become his party’s leader instead of Mr Clegg, had not a pre-Christmas postal strike in 2007 led to thousands of votes in his party’s leadership election arriving after the ballot boxes had closed.

Until yesterday, he would have been the likeliest replacement for Mr Clegg were the latter to have been forced out by party activists still grumbling over his decision to join the Coalition.

Westmorland and Lonsdale MP Tim Farron, the party’s distinctly Coalition-sceptic president, now looks odds-on for that role, possibly as soon as 2015 in the event of Mr Clegg’s three-way marginal Sheffield Hallam seat turning either red or blue next time round.

The short-term impact, then, of Mr Huhne’s departure is that it will embolden the Tory right and make this look even more obviously a Conservative-led government than it already is.

This in turn will be good news for Labour and Ed Miliband, whose essential line of attack on the Coalition is that it is a Tory government in all but name, and who this week restored some of his party’s sagging morale by putting Mr Cameron on the back foot over bankers’ bonuses.

The real nightmare scenario for the government, though, would come if Mr Huhne were to go to jail – forcing a by-election in his highly marginal seat of Eastleigh which would pitch the Lib Dems and the Tories against eachother.

And the potential consequences of that for the Coalition hardly need spelling out.

The challenge for Clegg

So Nick Clegg it is. I made no secret of the fact that I supported Chris Huhne, but although I still have my doubts over whether Clegg is quite the gifted communicator his supporters have always made him out to be, I wish him well.

Britain needs a successful Liberal Democrat party for the simple reason that New Labour has never really been that serious about implementing the constitutional changes needed to introduce genuine democracy to this country. It abandoned any meaningful look at a fair voting system within 18 months of the first term, and has had to be dragged kicking and screaming to an acceptance of the very basic democratic principle that members of the second chamber of Parliament should be elected.

Labour's conversion to greenery has also been rather dilatory and skin-deep in my view. On these and other issues the Lib Dems and their predecessor parties have been setting the agenda in British politics for most of my adult life.

So the first challenge for Clegg in my view is to re-establish the Lib Dems as the party of the environment at the very point it has become the touchstone issue for many voters, and the party of political reform at a time when trust in the established order has never been lower. If he can do this, then I and others will forgive him any amount of cliche-ridden vacuity of the kind we heard in his acceptance speech.

It is clear from both post-declaration speeches that the two candidates have now put the Calamity Clegg episode behind them and are now preparing to work closely together. Huhne has to be Shadow Foreign Secretary in my view, possibly also retaining the climate change brief - it is global warming we are talking about after all.

As a further unifying gesture, I hope Clegg can find room in his team for Huhne's campaign manager, the excellent Lynne Featherstone.

He would of course be mad to move Vince Cable from the Treasury brief, and I don't think for a minute that he will do, but the now-vacant Home Office brief offers the chance for a bold appointment, with Julia Goldsworthy, Ed Davey and David Laws all potential candidates.

Meanwhile, expect Clegg to be the subject of a sustained love-bombing campaign from the Tory bloggers as they seek to persuade Clegg to join Sham Cam's so-called "progressive alliance." Indeed, some would say this has already begun.

Is this what Blair v Brown would have been like?

As regular readers of this blog will know, I both like and admire Chris Huhne while having always been rather sceptical about his rival Nick Clegg, but I can't help but feel that it is the 53-year-old environment spokesman who will end up being the most damaged by yesterday's unedifying spat on the BBC Politics Show.

The nuclear option of attacking Clegg personally and portraying him as Cameron-lite was always open to Huhne, but I only expected him to deploy that option had it reached the point where he had nothing to lose. What I cannot understand is why he opted to deploy it at this stage, after a strong Question Time performance last week which would have persuaded many undecided party members to vote for him.

For what it's worth, my view is that they will now be less likely to do so. However its MPs might behave, the Liberal Democrat grassroots are emphatically not the nasty party, and its membership will take a dim view of anyone who so openly attacks a colleague.

Whichever of the two candidates ends up as leader, they are both major assets to the party, and for one of them to attack the other in that way diminishes that asset as well as dividing the party. In the words of one opposition commentator today, "anyone who was thinking of voting LibDem will have been profundly put off by the whole episode."

One person who knows this all too well is Gordon Brown. In 1994, he could have deployed the nuclear option against Tony Blair, portraying him as SDP Mark II (if only...!) and highlighting his policy flip-flops in much the same way Huhne did to Clegg.

I still believe Brown could have beaten Blair by employing such a strategy, but he knew that the party would have ended up so divided that victory would not have been worth the candle. I fear that this is now the fate awaiting Huhne should he go on to defy the odds and win.

Question Time: Huhne shades it

Nick Clegg has based his campaign for the leadership of the Lib Dems on the fact that he is seen as a "great communicator," so he ought to be worried by the fact that his rival Chris Huhne is widely seen to have shaded last night's head-to-head debate on Question Time in Buxton. This thread on Lib Dem Voice gives a good flavour of the reactions from party members who watched the programme, while there's also a useful round-up of blogospheric reactions so far from Paul Walter.

For my part, I agree that Huhne came over as the more impressive candidate. He seemed both more assured than Clegg and noticeably more passionate, particularly on the issue of Trident which will go down well with many party members.

Clegg seemed in difficulty from the first question, which incidentally came from my friend Gill Reade, of Belper, on whether the party had been damaged by the way it had despatched its last two leaders. When David Dimbleby picked up the "nasty party" theme to challenge Clegg over an attack he made on Huhne last year, the frontrunner seemed flummoxed and unsure of how to respond.

Huhne also dealt more intelligently with the second question, on who the Lib Dems should form a coalition with. He made the very valid point that, in the current climate of political cross-dressing, a coalition between Labour and the Conservatives would make rather more political sense than a coalition between either main party and the Lib Dems.

It was only when they got to the third question, on Trident, that it threatened to get nasty. Clegg accused Huhne, by a rather roundabout argument, of being a unilateral re-armer, not a disarmer. Huhne said that anyone who imagined Trident would be any use against Afterdinnerjazz was "living in cloud cuckoo land."

"Chris for now, Nick for the future" seemed to be the general verdict on Lib Dem Voice. It is one that I would endorse.

An even match

Nikc Clegg continues to be the hot favourite in the Lib Dem leadership contest, but among readers of this blog, at least, the two candidates are fairly evenly matched. My recent poll on the contest showed a slight preference for Clegg, but only by a margin of 53-47 over his rival Chris Huhne. Of course it's totally unscientific, and I would say probably well under half of readers of my blog are Liberal Democrats, but this result echoes my own hunch that the outcome of the election will be closer than many are currently predicting.

Julia G 4 Us!

I have noticed over recent weeks that there seems to be much less interest in the current Lib Dem leadership contest among readers of this blog than there was last time round in February 2006. Perhaps this is because people are simply not inspired by the two candidates.

If the results of my recent poll are anything to go by, what most of you really wanted to see was a generational/gender contest between Julia Goldsworthy and Charles Kennedy. I certainly agree that those two would have made it a much more interesting battle.

Question: Who would you have voted for in the Lib Dem leadership contest had all these candidates been standing?

Julia Goldsworthy 28%
Charles Kennedy 24%
Nick Clegg 8%
David Laws 8%
Vincent Cable 7%
Steve Webb 7%
Simon Hughes 6%
Chris Huhne 6%
Susan Kramer 4%
Ed Davey 1%

Is there more to Clegg than meets the eye?

I have to say that Nick Clegg went up in my estimation today after reading this story in which he pledges to lead a public campaign of law-breaking against the Government's ID card scheme.

"If the legislation is passed I will lead a grassroots campaign of civil disobedience to thwart the identity cards programme ... I, and I expect thousands of people like me, will simply refuse ever to register," he said.

Clegg has spent most of this leadership campaign giving progressives like me reasons not to vote for him - all the talk about the Lib Dems needing to stop "looking inward" is really just code for saying the party needs to travel lighter in ideological terms.

But if he really is prepared to become the first party leader in living memory to go to jail for his principles, then perhaps he is not quite the identikit member of the "political class" that on the surface he seems to be.

As I pointed out in my Saturday column last week, Gordon Brown's pretensions to be a champion of "liberty" will be pretty hollow unless he is prepares to reconsider the ID card scheme.

Loath as I am to urge him to nick any more ideas off the Tories, David Cameron's mob have put themselves on the right side of both popular opinion and liberal opinion on this one - two things that rarely seem to coincide.

Of all the crazy ideas put forward during the Blair era, this is the very first that Brown should have dispensed with in his determination to put some distance between him and his predecessor.

By comparison, supercasinos and the law on cannabis are pretty small beer.

A wider choice, please

Nominations in the Lib Dem leadership contest close on Wednesday, and it seems 99.9pc certain that the party will have a straight choice between Nick Clegg and Chris Huhne. The distinctions between the two candidates have sharpened over the weekend with Huhne coming out against Trident and Clegg making clear his support for the independent nuclear deterrent. Twenty years on from the infamous Steel-Owen wrangle over defence which wrecked the Liberal-SDP's chances in the 1987 election, it seems the differences within the party over this issue are as strong as ever.

Meanwhile, readers of this blog have been making clear their own view that they would have appreciated a wider choice in this leadership election, as indeed I would. My two polls show Huhne narrowly ahead of Clegg in a head-to-head contest, but well behind Charles Kennedy and Julia Goldsworthy in a notional poll involving all the candidates who previously ruled themselves out.

To say how you would cast your vote between Clegg and Huhne, click HERE. To choose between Vincent Cable, Clegg, Ed Davey, Goldsworthy, Simon Hughes, Huhne, Kennedy, Susan Kramer, David Laws and Steve Webb, click HERE. And if you think I'm paying far too much attention to the Lib Dem contest, please say so in the comments!

I've still not made up my mind

In my Saturday column last weekend, which can be read HERE, I set out the dilemma currently facing the Liberal Democrats thus:

"Can they bring themselves to vote for someone whose views they know to be well to the right of their own, in the knowledge that he is the candidate most likely to win them more seats?"

I am still unsure in my own mind what the answer is. So, for that matter, are at least three of the Lib Dem bloggers I have the most respect for - Jonathan Calder, James Graham and Paul Walter.

What I am sure of, as I argued HERE, is that the choice is a very real one which will have repercussions not just for the the Lib Dems but for the whole balance of British political debate.

There was no such dilemma last time round. Up against Sir Ming Campbell and Simon Hughes, Chris Huhne was easily the most right-wing of the candidates, and thus the one most likely to win seats off the Tories. But his views were still identifiably social democratic in a way that Nick Clegg's are not.

My heart still says Huhne. He is much the more centrist of the two candidates, has made clear he is prepared to use the tax system in the cause both of greater equality and a greener environment, and has insisted that proportional representation should remain a precondition of any post-election deal with the other parties.

By contrast, Clegg appears to be the establishment candidate, favoured by the very same numpty MPs who thought replacing Chatshow Charlie with Mogadon Ming would restore the party's fortunes.

Part of me admires his courage in that he is clearly running against his party in this election, but like Matthew Huntbach I have no illusions about what that will mean - that most of the principles the left of the party has most held dear will end up being sold down the river.

So if what was at stake was simply the future of the Liberal Democrats as a progressive, social democratic party, it would be a no brainer: vote Huhne.

But what is at stake goes much wider than that - specifically, the fact that the choice could have very clear implications for how many people end up voting Conservative at the next general election.

If the greater cause of British social democracy requires that David Cameron has to be stopped in order that the governance of this country should continue to reflect the views of its natural centre-left majority, then Clegg is clearly the more sensible choice.

It's a tricky one, isn't it? Maybe you, dear readers, can help me make up my mind by casting your preferences HERE.

A siren Lib Dem voice?

"In particular, I find merely for raising concern about the way Britain is becoming more economically divided, the rich getting richer, the poor getting poorer, I’m getting dismissed as some old style lefty who shouldn’t really be in the party by Clegg supporters. Well if that’s what you lot are really like, it’s bye-bye Liberal Democrats from me if Clegg wins. I wish I hadn’t bothered with all the work I put in helping to turn Lewisham from a LibDem black hole into an area where we’re now seriously considering winning at Parliamentary level."

- Matthew Huntbach, commenting on Lib Dem Voice.

Obviously sound judgement

MPs who supported Ming Campbell in the 2006 Lib Dem leadership election:

Danny Alexander
Norman Baker
John Barrett
Tom Brake
Colin Breed
Jeremy Browne
Malcolm Bruce
Paul Burstow
Vince Cable
Alistair Carmichael
Nick Clegg
Edward Davey
Don Foster
Andrew George
Julia Goldsworthy
Nick Harvey
John Hemming
Paul Keetch
Norman Lamb
David Laws
Michael Moore
John Pugh
Alan Reid
Dan Rogerson
Adrian Sanders
Robert Smith
Jo Swinson
Matthew Taylor
Sarah Teather
John Thurso
Jenny Willott

MPs who are supporting Nick Clegg in the current Lib Dem leadership election:

Danny Alexander
Colin Breed
Jeremy Browne
Malcolm Bruce
Alistair Carmichael
Ed Davey
Tim Farron
Don Foster
Julia Goldsworthy
Nick Harvey
Mike Hancock
Mark Hunter
Paul Keetch
Norman Lamb
David Laws
Michael Moore
Greg Mulholland
Mark Oaten
John Pugh
Willie Rennie
Paul Rowen
Sir Robert Smith
Sarah Teather
Steve Webb
Stephen Williams
Phil Willis

There is a real choice

Martin Kettle wrote an excellent piece on Saturday arguing that we should not fall into the trap of believing that there is no real choice to be made between Chris Huhne and Nick Clegg for the job of Lib Dem leader because their politics are exactly the same, although it is fair to say his real target here was probably not the Lib Dems but those of us who argued that there was no real choice between his old buddy Tony Blair and the Tories.

Unfortunately, however, Messrs Clegg and Huhne themselves seem to be doing their best to encourage what Kettle terms this "cynical and disdainful" view of political debate.

If the two candidates have indeed signed up to a non-aggression pact over policy, it is a particularly daft move on Chris Huhne's part. Huhne is older, greyer, duller and more cerebral. He cannot possibly beat Nick Clegg in a style v style contest, only by presenting it as a battle of style v substance.

For my part, I continue to believe there are real policy issues at stake in this contest, even if the arguments between the candidates are slightly nuanced. Electoral reform is one such issue.

This morning, Huhne makes clear that PR for Westminster should remain a pre-condition for any post-election deal with either of the two main parties. By contrast Clegg is on record as having said the Lib Dems should stop banging on about PR, because it "makes people think we are only interested in getting our bums on seats."

I am not suggesting for a moment that Clegg does not believe in PR for Westminster, just that it clearly isn't as high a priority for him. Given that politics is the language of priorities, it is nonsense to suggest that such differences of emphasis do not matter.

Clegg decoded

Nick Clegg's campaign launch this morning only served to strengthen my view that he intends to define himself in opposition to his party's traditional supporters, Here are some highlights, with some slightly tongue-in-cheek interpretations from yours truly.

What he said: "Ming is a man of integrity, honour and decency. Over the years he has also shown himself to be a man of impeccable judgment and extraordinary political courage."

What he meant: He made the right decision to resign.

What he said: "Over the last two years or so, the Liberal Democrats have been looking inwards too much."

What he meant: Don't vote for the candidate whose political views are closer to your own, vote for the one who the press tells you is the biggest vote-winner.

What he said: "If the Liberal Democrats are to change the tired old pattern of British politics, we are going to have to be bold, we will have to move outside our comfort zone and take greater risks than we ever have before."

What he meant: I'm going to sell our principles completely down the river.

What he said: "I want us to extend our reach and broaden our appeal to voters beyond the "Westminster village."

What he meant: I'm better looking than Chris Huhne.

Clegg in the driving seat

There is no disguising the fact that Steve Webb's decision to back out of the Lib Dem leadership contest and back Nick Clegg is a serious blow to Chris Huhne's hopes.

Webb was to have been the candidate of the social liberal, pro-redistribution wing of the party and had he stood the Huhne camp will have been reckoning on the majority of his votes transferring to their candidate on the second ballot.

Not only will that not now happen, but Webb is actually signalling that people who would have voted for him should support Clegg, enabling the Sheffield MP to claim that he is the candidate who can unite both wings of the party.

It's a very shrewd move on Webb's part. He wouldn't have won the leadership, but by backing the candiate most likely to, he has almost certainly earned himself a top-ranking job in Clegg's new Shadow Cabinet line-up.

My question is whether the social liberals who have decided to back Clegg rather than the more left-leaning Huhne - Julia Goldsworthy is another - will end up getting decidely more than they are bargaining for.

I think he could well turn out to be a Tony Blair figure in more ways than one, defining himself in oppositon to his party's traditional supporters. Under Clegg, the social liberal agenda could end up as dead a duck as democratic socialism under Blair.

Whither the Lib Dems?

Back in February 2006, having unceremoniously knifed their most successful leader in 80 years amid lurid and unsubstantiated tales of heavy drinking sessions and soiled underpants, the Lib Dems had a chance to make a fresh start under a new leader from the younger generation of MPs.

Chris Huhne stood in that election as the change candidate, putting forward a clear and compelling message which combined economic credibility with strong social justice and environmental credentials. Instead, the party opted for the "safe" option of Sir Menzies Campbell.

It was a mistake, and some of us said so at the time. That said, having put its trust in Ming to lead them up to the next election - then, as now, expected in 2009 - the party ought to have had the decency to stand by him.

A party which chops and changes its leaders cannot expect to be taken seriously by the electorate, and increasingly, this seems to be the Lib Dems' fate.

Having backed Huhne last time, it would seem logical for me to do so again, but given that this is unlikely to be a generational contest in the way that one was, I think the arguments are slightly less clear-cut this time round.

Over the ensuing 18 months, Huhne seems to have become unfairly categorised as a "left" candidate who reaches out more to Labour voters than to Tory ones. I am not at all sure that this is true, but he needs to overcome that perception if he is to put himself forward as a plausible leader at this particular juncture.

It would not in my view send out the right strategic message were the party to appear more interested in outflanking Labour at this stage. In terms of defending their key marginals in the south, and maybe even building on that base next time round, the Lib Dems need to choose the person who is going to cause maximum difficulties for the Tories.

There seems to be a common consensus that this would be Nick Clegg, although I personally am far from convinced by him. As someone said on this blog last week: "He was impressive as an MEP but since arriving at Westminster has given off an air of dessicated self-satisfaction" - another way of saying he just assumes the job is his by right.

For my part, I'd like to see a slightly wider choice of candidates. Julia Goldsworthy is bright, telegenic, and female, and 28 years after Margaret Thatcher became Premier it's high time we had another woman at the top of British politics. And David Laws, not Clegg, is the real intellectual engine of the "Orange Bookers" and deserves a crack at the top job.

But it is a sad fact about the Lib Dems that most of their most able figures have their best days behind them. By far the most impressive and substantial figures in their ranks are Paddy Ashdown and Shirley Williams, while Vince Cable is head and shoulders above the rest of the MPs, even though yesterday he looked like a mafia boss telling us that Ming was sleeping with the fishes.

Either way, I hope for the Lib Dems' sake that whoever wins is granted the automatic loyalty that the party's leaders used to merit and allowed to fight at least two elections as both Ashdown and Charles Kennedy were. That is how they used to do things in the Lib Dems in the days when they were successful, instead of giving a poor impersonation of the nasty party.

British politics needs a successful Liberal Democrat party. It is high time it got its act together.