Opposition parties pay bitter price for 2010 mistakes

Labour hobbled itself in Thursday's election by choosing the wrong brother as leader in 2010, while the Liberal Democrats lost their political identity by joining the coalition. Here's my election round-up which will appear in today's edition of The Journal.

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SO we all got it wrong.  All the speculation about hung Parliaments, deals with the Scottish National Party, questions of what would constitute a ‘legitimate’ minority government – in the end, it all proved to be so much hot air.

Labour and the Liberal Democrats are not the only political institutions that will need to take a long, hard look at themselves after the biggest general election upset since 1992.   So will the opinion polling industry.

Its continued insistence that the two main parties were running neck and neck, and that we were duly headed for a hung Parliament, ended up framing the main debate around which the campaign revolved in its latter stages.

Had the polls showed the Tories with a six-point lead, the debate would not have been about whether Ed Miliband would do a deal with Nicola Sturgeon, but about whether the NHS would survive another five years of David Cameron.

There were many reasons why, to my mind, the Conservatives did not deserve to be re-elected, not least the divisive way in which they fought the campaign.

By relying on fear of the Scottish Nationalists to deliver victory in England and thereby setting the two nations against eachother, Mr Cameron has brought the union he professes to love to near-breaking point.

Preventing this now deeply divided country from flying apart is going to require a markedly different and more inclusive style of politics in Mr Cameron’s second term, in which devolution and possibly also electoral reform will be key.

Thankfully the Prime Minister appears to recognise this, although one is perhaps entitled to a certain degree of scepticism over his sudden rediscovery of “One Nation Conservatism” yesterday morning.

But what of the opposition parties?  Well, it is fair to say that both suffered more from mistakes made not during this election campaign but in the aftermath of the last one.

Make no mistake, this was an eminently winnable election for Labour, but it would have been a great deal more winnable had the party chosen the former South Shields MP David Miliband as its leader in 2010 ahead of his younger brother.

That said, Ed fought a much better campaign than many anticipated and stood up well in the face of some disgraceful and frankly juvenile attacks by certain sections of the national media.

What may have swung the undecideds against him in the end was his apparent state of denial about the last Labour government’s spending record, while I shouldn’t think the tombstone helped much either.

Of course - Stockton South aside - Labour continued to perform well in the North East on Thursday, and the party also had a reasonably good night in London.

It was the East and West Midlands that proved particularly allergic to Mr Miliband’s party, and it is here that whoever emerges from the forthcoming leadership contest will need to concentrate their energies with 2020 in mind.

Mr Miliband has facilitated that contest by swiftly falling on his sword, and with deputy leader Harriet Harman also set to stand down, the party will now be able to choose a new team to take it forward.

After such a shattering defeat there will doubtless be calls for a completely fresh start, and new names such as Liz Kendall, Dan Jarvis and Stella Creasy will come into the frame alongside some of the more usual suspects.

As for the Liberal Democrats, well, the Tories’ cannibalisation of their erstwhile coalition partners seems to prove once and for all that Nick Clegg made a catastrophic misjudgement in taking them into government in 2010 – as some of us warned him at the time.

He has also been rightly punished by the electorate for what many saw as an appalling breach of trust over university tuition fees.

The upshot is that a party which achieved a fifth of the national vote under Paddy Ashdown and Charles Kennedy has not just lost nearly all its MPs, more seriously it has lost its identity.

The laws of political dynamics will ensure Labour eventually bounces back from this defeat, just as it did in 1964 and 1997.  For the Lib Dems, though, the future is much more uncertain.

Clegg's apology will not ultimately save his leadership

Broken promises are nothing new in politics.  From the Labour Party’s 110-year-old pledge to introduce an elected House of Lords to George H.W. Bush’s infamous one-liner ‘Read my lips, No new taxes,’ history is full of instances of parties and politicians failing to keep their word.

But there seems to be something about the subject of university tuition fees which brings out the worst in politicians where keeping promises is concerned.

Back in 2001, New Labour went into the general election with the cast-iron manifesto pledge:  “We will not introduce top-up fees and have legislated to prevent them.”

Less than two years later Tony Blair’s government duly introduced them, in the teeth of a backbench parliamentary revolt in which several leading North-East Labour MPs were to the fore.

If Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg had been more of a student of history, perhaps he would have reflected on this before issuing his similarly unequivocal pledge not to raise tuition fees in the run-up to the 2010 election.

Then again, had he done so he might have concluded that breaking promises is not necessarily politically fatal.   After all, Mr Blair’s original broken pledge on tuition fees did not prevent him winning a third general election in 2005.

By the same token, keeping your election promises is no guarantee of political success.

Indeed, it was Margaret Thatcher’s determination to stick to a promise to reform the system of domestic rates that led to the disastrous implementation of the poll tax in 1988 and indirectly to her fall from power two years later.

But for the Liberal Democrats, there was something about breaking the tuition fee pledge that seemed to strike at the heart of what the party is and what it stands for.

Partly because of its strong activist base in the education sector, and perhaps also because of its level of support among students, the question of tuition fees had become something of a touchstone issue for the party.

It was certainly one of the biggest reasons why, in the North East, the Liberal Democrats had become credible challengers in seats with large concentrations of students such as Newcastle Central and Durham City.

So in this sense, for the party leadership to change its mind over the issue was always likely to be viewed as a betrayal on a par with a Labour leader calling for the privatisation of the NHS or a Tory leader announcing we should join the euro.

But this is not all.    There was also something about the idea of breaking election promises at all that ran counter to the Lib Dems’ self-image as a party.

This is why the broken promise on tuition fees was such a watershed for the party – the moment it gave up – possibly for all time – any claim to be representative of a “new” or different kind of politics.

It is for all those reasons that Mr Clegg issued his videoed apology to party supporters this week ahead of what is certain to be a difficult party conference for him.

Whether it will do him any good however remains very much to be seen.  Many of the party’s supporters are likely to take a fairly dim view of the fact that he appeared to be apologising not for breaking the ‘solemn’ promise, but for having made it in the first place.

Mr Clegg finds himself in a strange kind of political limbo.  Despite the comments by Lib Dem peer Lord Oakeshott last month that any business that had lost so much market share would now be under new management, the coming conference week will not see any overt challenge to his leadership.

Yet at the same time, it is hard to find many Liberal Democrats who seriously believe Mr Clegg will actually lead them into the next general election in 2015.

The remorseless logic of their plight is that if they are to present themselves to the electorate as a viable alternative to the Tories as well as to Labour, it will have to be without the man who took them into a Tory-led coalition.

But that is next year’s Lib Dem conference story.  For now, Mr Clegg continues to inhabit the ranks of the political living dead.

Dave's useful idiots

Of all the many insults hurled at Gordon Brown during his troubled premiership, perhaps the most wounding was the one delivered by the then Lib Dem acting leader Vince Cable during Prime Minister's Questions in November 2007.

"The House has noticed the Prime Minister’s remarkable transformation in the last few weeks from Stalin to Mr Bean," he told guffawing MPs.

But three years on, the now former Prime Minister may well have permitted himself a wry smile or two at the transformation in Mr Cable's own political fortunes.

In the space of less than 12 months, he has gone from Saint Vince, the most trusted politician in Britain, to a man now widely regarded as little more than a useful idiot for the Tory-led coalition.

Some of it is purely by virtue of his having swapped the luxuries of opposition for the harsh realities of power, at a time when the government was bound to be unpopular whoever was in it.

Yet even within that context, Mr Cable has demonstrated an unusual ability to shoot himself in the head.

His 'declaration of war' on media baron Rupert Murdoch, after being honeytrapped by a pair of female undercover reporters into speaking too frankly about his government role, has backfired more spectacularly than a turbo-charged boomerang.

The end result was that Tory culture secretary Jeremy Hunt this week nodded through a deal which will make Murdoch the dominant player in UK print and broadcast media, with even more financial clout than the BBC.

But if Dr Cable's ambitions in the field of media policy have been well and truly thwarted, the same would seem to apply to his conduct of regional policy.

After the election last May, Dr Cable put it about that he was going into bat to ensure that those English regions that wanted to would retain a region-wide political and economic voice.

Such a stance was, after all, in keeping with a Lib Dem election manifesto that promised to "reform" regional development agencies rather than abolish them wholesale as the Tories' did.

At one stage, Dr Cable was privately telling regional political leaders that the RDAs in the North East, North West and Yorkshire would be effectively be preserved, under the new guise of Local Economic Partnerships.

On the face of it, it hardly seemed Dr Cable's fault that this did not end up happening, and that communities secretary Eric Pickles prevailed in his determination to dismantle the entire regional political infrastructure.

Yet a Freedom of Information request by the Newcastle Journal has since revealed that, far from putting up a huge show of resistance, Dr Cable met his Tory counterpart just twice to discuss the issue.

In terms of the bigger picture, the RDA abolition and the Murdoch bid for BskyB point to a wider political reality - the inability of the Lib Dems to influence major policy decisions taken by this government.

And if proof was needed that this is now a widespread perception among the public, the result of Thursday's Barnsley by-election, which saw the party slumping to sixth place, surely provides it.

For some of us, the result brought back memories of those dear, dead days when world-weary Lib Dem activists used to sing a song called 'Losing Deposits' on the last night of their annual conference, to the tune of 'Waltzing Matilda.'

But for Dr Cable and his fellow Lib Dem ministers, there will be no such wallowing in nostalgia for more innocent political times.

Evidence is mounting that membership of this Coalition government is destroying the Lib Dems as a political force – possibly permanently.

How much more of it the party can take before it is obliged to go its own separate way will continue to be the defining question in British politics over the coming months.

Anarchy in the UK? This is not the country Cameron wants to lead

It is a moot point whether Thursday's protests over the government's decision to raise universities tuition fees to £9,000 amounted to the worst civil disturbances since the poll tax riots of 1990.

One should not forget that the fuel protests of autumn 2000 came close to bringing the country to a standstill - but they were by and large peaceful.

Measured purely in terms of street violence, this week's demonstrations almost certainly constituted the biggest outpouring of public anger seen since the days of Margaret Thatcher.

Should that be a warning sign to David Cameron and his coalition? Undoubtedly so.

The bare facts of the matter are that the government won the Commons vote on lifting the cap on fees by a majority of 21, down from its usual majority of 83.

While 28 Liberal Democrat MPs voted in support of the move, 21 defied the party leadership, including former leaders Charles Kennedy and Sir Menzies Campbell and a possible future leader, Tim Farron.

Meanwhile six Tory MPs also voted against the measure, including the former leadership contender David Davis who, like Mr Farron, appears to be positioning himself for the coalition's eventual collapse.

But while the government won the vote, the question is whether in doing so it lost the argument, as well control of the streets.

Conventional wisdom would suggest that the demonstrators have over-reached themselves, and that the ugliness of some of Thursday's scenes will turn the wider public against the students' cause.

In the short-term, it will have focused attention less on the fees issue than the question of whether security arrangements for the demo were even half way adequate.

But the debate over tuition fees is far from over. The House of Lords will certainly have a say on the matter, and there will have to be further legislation over the level and speed at which the fees are paid back.

That in turn is bound to lead to further rebellions which, if successful, could ultimately force the government to unpick the entire scheme.

So where does it leave the coalition? Well, firstly, what about the Lib Dems.

Their hope was that by getting the fees vote out of the way early on, it would enable them to move the political agenda onto other areas in which they are on firmer ground, such as political reform.

I wonder, however, whether memories will fade that easily, and whether we have not witnessed a seminal moment in terms of public perceptions of the third party.

It could well be that this will go down as the point at which the public stopped seeing the Lib Dems as a party of principle and started to see them as their opponents have always seem them – a bunch of opportunists who would break any promise for a taste of power.

Secondly, where do this week's events leave Mr Cameron? Despite his own protestations last week that he would "rather be a child of Thatcher than a son of Brown," he is not the Iron Lady.

His style is consensual rather than confrontational. Unlike his illustrious predecessor, he has no wish to see his premiership consumed by battles against the 'enemy within.'

Within weeks of those poll tax riots in the autumn of 1990, the Prime Minister had gone, albeit over a combination of that and other issues.

That is not going to happen to Mr Cameron just yet. But in his desire to lead a broadly united country, he won't want to see too many more weeks like this one.

Clegg cannot ignore his social democratic wing

Back in 1999, in his first keynote conference speech, Charles Kennedy insisted that the Liberal Democrats under his leadership would never become a "left-of-Labour party."

Nobody quite took the statement at face value, and neither, I suspect, did Mr Kennedy himself.

Sure enough, over the ensuing two elections, the man then known as 'Chatshow Charlie' succeeded in taking the Lib Dems to their highest-ever parliamentary representation by consistently taking left-of-Labour positions.

In 2001, it was the extra penny on income tax to pay for additional education spending that won over the voters, while in 2005, it was the party's opposition to the Iraq War.

Fast forward eleven years, and current Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg is making what at first hearing sound like similar noises about the party's positioning vis-à-vis Labour.

Interviewed before this week's conference in Liverpool, he said: "The vocation of Liberalism is not to be a leftwing ghetto for people who are disaffected by the Labour Party."

The difference between Messrs Kennedy and Clegg, though, is that Clegg means it.

Not only has he gone into coalition with the Tories. He is almost saying 'good riddance' to those left-of-centre voters who have helped keep the party afloat over the past decade as New Labour continued its rightward drift.

He said in his interview: "I'm not denying there is a chunk of people who turned to the Liberal Democrats at the height of Blair's authoritarianism and his fascination with Bush…that was always going to unwind at some point."

True up to a point….but unless he is genuinely relaxed about his party losing more than half its support at the next election, the logic of Mr Clegg's position – if you can call it logic – is very clear.

It is that, between now and 2015, he is going to have to find himself an entirely new set of voters - particularly in the North where the 'disaffected ex-Labour' vote makes up a fair slice of Lib Dem support.

Which in turn begs the question: where on earth are they going to come from?

Before delivering his two-fingered message to his left-of-centre supporters, Mr Clegg would perhaps have done well to consider his party's recent history.

The Liberal Democrats, it should be remembered, are a fairly recent amalgamation of two parties with very different philosophical strands – the Liberals, and the Social Democrats.

The party is therefore itself a coalition of economic liberals such as Mr Clegg who feel naturally comfortable as part of a Tory-led government, and social democrats like Mr Kennedy to whom it is anathema.

Perhaps this goes some way to explaining why one opinion poll this week showed that more than half of Lib Dem voters regard the coalition as a sell-out, while 40pc said they voted Lib Dem specifically to keep the Tories out.

In his speech on Monday, Mr Clegg made an impassioned plea to his party to "stick with" the coalition, promising it would "change Britain for good."

Well, they'll stick with it as far as the referendum on voting reform next May. But after that, all bets are off are far as I can see.

I'll make another prediction, too. Mr Clegg will not find an army of new Liberal Democrat supporters waiting around for someone to vote for, and he will therefore be forced in the end to try to hang on to his existing ones.

And he won't be able to do that unless he can somehow first find a way of getting his party out of this coalition alive.

Will Vince Cable be the next Chancellor?

IN an election where the state of the economy is likely to be more central than ever to the outcome, it is not surprising that the identity of the next Chancellor is almost as burning an issue as that of the next Prime Minister.

From being seen at one time as a weak link in Labour’s armoury – not least by Gordon Brown himself who wanted to replace him with Ed Balls – Alastair Darling has unexpectedly emerged as one of the government’s few genuine assets.

Okay, so his third Budget ten days ago contained no new ideas and few positive reasons to vote Labour on May 6 save that of ‘better the devil you know.’

But that was not the point. Somehow, Mr Darling seems to have established himself in the public’s mind as that rare thing in 21st Century Britain – a politician who tells it like it is.

So the TV confrontation this week between Mr Darling and his opposition shadows Vince Cable and George Osborne was one of the more eagerly awaited events of the seemingly interminable pre-election countdown.

It was given added spice by the fact that Mr Osborne’s political trajectory has been almost the diametric opposite of Mr Darling’s over the past two and a half years.

Back in the autumn of 2007, he was the Tory hero whose bold promise to raise inheritance tax thresholds was seen as largely responsible for putting the frighteners on Mr Brown’s election plans.

But just as that IT pledge has become something of a millstone around the Tories’ necks in these more straitened times, so Mr Osborne has become increasingly perceived as their ‘weakest link.’

It was very clear from the Tory Shadow Chancellor’s performance in Monday night’s debate that he had been reading the findings of Labour’s focus groups which called him “shrill, immature and lightweight.”

But in his efforts to appear statesmanlike, he rather over-compensated, leading one pundit to describe he and Mr Darling as “the bland leading the bland.”

Instead, it was Mr Cable who earned the lion’s share of the audience applause on the night, for instance over his refusal to indulge in impossible promises on NHS spending.

So which one of them, if any, will be Chancellor? It’s not necessarily as straightforward a question as it may seem.

Sure, if Labour wins outright, Mr Darling will stay on. Mr Brown has already been forced to say as much, putting his old ally Mr Balls’ ambitions on hold once more.

But in the event of a Tory victory, or a hung Parliament, the situation becomes much less clear cut.

There have long been rumours in Tory circles that Mr Osborne won’t go to 11 Downing Street even if they win outright.

The talk is that David Cameron could give the job of sorting out the economic mess either to old-hand Ken Clarke, or to right-wing axe-man Philip Hammond.

Most intriguing is the fate of Mr Cable. Clearly he will not be Chancellor in a Lib Dem government – but could he hold the role in a Labour or Tory-led coalition?

The short answer to that is yes. For all Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg’s refusal to play the ‘kingmaker,’ securing the Treasury for Mr Cable is likely to be central to any post-election deal in a hung Parliament.

The opinion polls continue to point to this as the likeliest election outcome, with the Tory lead still insufficient to give them an outright majority.

The race for Number 10 clearly lies between Mr Cameron and Mr Brown. But in the race for Number 11, it is the Liberal Democrat contender who is in pole position.

So just what do the Lib Dems stand for?

Nick Clegg scored 10 out of 10 for ambition in Bournemouth, and top marks for avoiding the trap set by David Cameron. But he needs to learn a thing or two about party management. Here's today's Journal column.

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And so we come again to the conference season, and not just any old conference season, but the one which will see the race to govern Britain for the next five years effectively begin in earnest.

Most of the country will see it as a two-horse race between Labour and the Tories, but once a year, at their annual conference, the Liberal Democrats get the opportunity to explain why this cosy consensus should be broken up.

Whether Nick Clegg and his party made the most of that opportunity, amid a week of bickering and backbiting in Bournemouth, must be very much open to question.

But one thing you certainly can’t fault is the scope of his ambition. “I want to be Prime Minister because I have spent half my lifetime imagining a better society, and I want to spend the next half making it happen,” he told the gathering on Wednesday.

Lib Dem leaders have been somewhat wary of talking too openly about the prospects of power ever since David Steel’s infamous “go back to you constituencies and prepare for government” speech at his party’s 1981 conference in Llandudno.

The best they’ve been able to hope for since those heady days has been to hold the balance of power, although as yet, it has never actually happened.

But Mr Clegg, to give him his due, was not going to be bounced by Tory leader David Cameron into talking about which of the two main parties he would back in the event of a hung Parliament.

If the Lib Dem conference represents his one chance a year to say what he would do I the unlikely event of him actually becoming Prime Minister, he was going to make sure he took it.

Mr Cameron’s eve-of-conference “love bomb” urging the Lib Dems to team up with the Tories in a grand anti-Labour coalition was an extremely mischievous intervention by the Tory leader on a number of levels.

For one thing, his claim that there is “not a cigarette paper” between the two parties on key issues of policy is about as mendacious and misleading a claim as he has ever made – and that’s saying something.

As the Lib Dems’ chief of staff Danny Alexander swiftly pointed out, while the Tories want to reduce inheritance tax for the richest 1pc of people in the country, the Lib Dems want to take the poorest out of income tax altogether.

And for all Mr Cameron’s supposed “greenery,” his party’s representatives in Europe have allied themselves with a bunch of climate change deniers in the European Parliament.

But Mr Cameron’s suggestion was mischievous on another level too, because he knows perfectly well that there is only one thing the Lib Dems actually could do in the event of a hung Parliament – and that is support the Tories.

This is not just because it would be political suicide for Mr Clegg to be propping up a Labour government that had just lost its majority. It is about simple electoral arithmetic.

Such is the inbuilt bias of the electoral system towards Labour, that so long as Labour achieves the largest share of the vote, it is bound to have an absolute majority in the next House of Commons.

Therefore the only way in which a hung Parliament can actually occur is if the Tories are ahead on share of the vote, but by not quite enough to form a government on their own.

In those circumstances, the Liberal Democrats would really have only course of action consistent with their advocacy of a “fair” voting system – and that would be to support the Tories as the party with the biggest share of the vote.

Mr Cameron knows this, and so does Mr Clegg – which is why he is all the more determined not to admit it. To do so would remove any reason for voting Lib Dem at all

That said, post-Bournemouth, the country is really no clearer on what the reasons for voting Lib Dem actually are.

The arguments over university tuition fees and the proposed imposition of a “mansion tax” on homes worth more than £1m have hardly served to clarify the party’s message.

Charles Kennedy’s strategy in his time as Lib Dem leader was to have two or three distinctive policies that would separate his party from the common herd – for instance, abolishing tuition fees.

It was not surprising to see the man who led the Lib Dems to the best performance by a third party since the 1920s bemoaning the loss of some of those policies this week

Mr Clegg may be right that different times demand different solutions – but his problem he has yet to find anything as distinctive to put in their place.

As for his talk of “savage cuts” or “progressive austerity” - yet another abuse of the p-word – this is hardly a very different agenda from that being put forward by the two main parties.

Nor surprisingly, media attention has already shifted towards Labour’s conference in Brighton beginning tomorrow.

Yesterday’s revelations that the mole behind the MPs’ expenses scandal was motivated by the lack of resources for British troops in Afghanistan links two of the three big running political stories of the year.

Meanwhile the third big story – the future of Gordon Brown – will continue to rumble on in the background at Brighton, with the party hoping against hope that their leader will manage to spell out some sort of compelling vision for a Labour fourth term.

If Mr Clegg’s task last week was to explain why he should become Prime Minister, Mr Brown’s even harder one this week will be to explain why on earth he should remain so.

Not left, not right, just a mess....

More Lib Demmery in tomorrow's column.

Openness, but only up to a point

Yesterday I ran a rather light-hearted post on the "Nick Clegg Superstud" revelations and other true stories that should have been April Fools. Judging by the lack of comments this attempt at sardonic humour obviously completely bombed, so it's back to serious today.

As the sage of Shropshire Jonathan Calder has already pointed out, releasing Clegg's GQ interview yesterday was a fiendishly clever piece of news management by the Lib Dems. The fact that it came out on April 1 would have led many people who read the story to assume it was a spoof, thereby lessening its impact.

But spoof it isn't and those Lib Dems of a sensitive disposition now have to get used to the fact that they now have a reformed serial shagger and teenage arsonist for a leader.

In what looks like something of a damage-limitation exercise, some of Clegg's colleagues have today praised his openness in being prepared to talk about such things, but they are missing one very vital point.

For me, the really interesting thing about Clegg is that while he is happy for us to know he was rather promiscuous in his younger days, happy for us to know he was an arsonist, happy for us to know he was a binge-drinker, even happy for us to know that he doesn't believe in God, he is still not prepared to say whether or not he has ever taken illegal drugs.

Once again, it begs the question just what is it about the drugs question that puts the willies up our political leaders, that causes the likes of Clegg to switch instantly from heart-on-the-sleeve mode to we're-entitled-to-a-private-life mode?

David Cameron famously refused to answer the same question after he became his party's leader, but even he owned up in the end, although the revelation that he had enjoyed a few spliffs at uni was a bit of a let-down to those who assumed his initial reticence must have meant the entire family fortune had disappeared up his nose.

If Clegg really does believe in "openness," he should bury this last taboo.

What price loyalty?

Iain Dale reports that the former Lib Dem candidate for Hull East in 2005 has joined the Tories, bringing the total number of such defections since the last election to seven.

People are entitled to change their minds, of course, but what I find hard to believe is that political parties so regularly display such lamentable judgement in selecting parliamentary candidates whose loyalty to their cause is so evidently skin-deep. That the Lib Dems managed to be hoodwinked seven times in this way when selecting its 2005 slate speaks volumes.

There are thousands of loyal footsoldiers out there who support the same party for decades and never even get asked to stand for their local school governing body, yet these shallow, opportunistic shysters manage to get themselves selected to stand for Parliament even though their only loyalty is to their own careers.

Am I the only person who feels this way when I read of these tales of treachery?

Europe debate not played out yet

In my Preview of 2008 at the end of December, the three things I confidently predicted would not happen this year were that there would not be a general election, that the Lib Dems would not changed their leader again, and that there would not be a referendum on the EU Treaty.

And indeed there will not be. Even if the Lib Dems had joined the Tories in the voting lobbies on Wednesday night, it still would not have been enough to force the government to hold a national vote on the issue without a much larger Labour rebellion.

But while that particular issue now seems to be done and dusted, there are other circumstances which could see the question of Britain's relationship with Europe back in the domestic political spotlight - as I argue in today's Journal column.

The first is if Tony Blair takes the EU presidency and every subsequent clash between Britain and Brussels becomes viewed through the prism of the Blair-Brown feud. It would be pure political soap opera, and the press would have an absolute field day with it.

More seriously, though, if concern about economic migration to Britain from within the EU continues to rise, it could conceivably create the conditions where withdrawal from the Union once again becomes a politically viable option.

My own view on this - though it goes against the grain of my views on both Europe and immigration generally - is that the conflict between continued unlimited immigration from Eastern Europe and our finite spatial resources will not easily be reconciled.

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.

Is it all over for Ming?

Well, if this story is anything to go by, yes. But what a truly witless bunch of people the Lib Dem parliamentary party is.

In January 2006, they got rid of Charles Kennedy knowing that his successor would almost certainly be Ming Campbell. Indeed some of those who signed the no confidence letter that brought Kennedy down were already pledged to support Ming in the ensuing contest.

Now, less than two years on, they apparently want to get rid of Ming as well, on the grounds that he will probably be 68 by the time of the next election. But shouldn't they have thought of that when they elected him?

Before all this Gordon Brown snap election nonsense was even a twinkle in Dougie Alexander's eye, it was overwhelmingly likely that the next election would be in 2009 and that Ming would therefore be, er, 68 at the time of it. Whatever it is the Lib Dems now stand for, it's certainly not loyalty.

What now for Ming?

Okay, so I never thought he should have become leader in the first place, but I find myself feeling increasingly sorry for Ming Campbell. His conference speech in Brighton was easily the best of the season, and even contained the best joke - the line about Dave wanting to be Tony but not Maggie, and Gordon wanting to be Maggie but not Tony, and Ming not wanting to be any of them.

But nothing has gone right for Ming since, and the media focus on a potential presidential contest between Gordon and Dave has left him and his party completely marginalised.

Today the news took a fresh turn for the worse. The latest Populus Poll put his party on 12pc of the vote, while Martin Baxter's acclaimed Electoral Calculus site now predicts the Lib Dems will lose all their seats, although Martin's formula does of course not allow for the "incumbency factor."

With Gordon now having seemingly put off the election till 2009, by which time Ming will be 68, it now seems a foregone conclusion that he will fall on his sword sometime between now and next spring, to give a new leader a year to bed himself in before the anticipated May 2009 poll.

If I thought the outcome of all this would be a Chris Huhne leadership, I would be mildly optimistic about the Lib Dems' prospects. But I suspect and fear that the real outcome will be that they choose Nick Clegg.

I've said it a few times before on other people's blogs, but I just can't see the attraction. Clegg is seen as the man who can take Lib Dem target seats off the Tories, but despite having had the sexiest brief on the Lib Dem frontbench for the past 18 months he has hardly set the Thames on fire.

If they are going to choose someone on the right of the party to compete for Tory votes, they would be better off in my view with brainy David Laws, currently an amazing 66-1 with the bookies.

As some wit on PB.com has pointed out, those odds are surely worth taking if only for the fact that it would enable you to sing "I backed Dave Laws, and Dave Laws won" to the tune of a certain Clash number.

....and could Brown survive the loss of his majority?

If the general election is finally called next week - and a growing number of pundits now think it won't be - there seem to me to be three plausible scenarios as to the possible outcome, as follows:

(i) Labour manages to hang on to its existing majority, there or thereabouts. I am as convinced as I can be that they will not increase it significantly, for the simple reason that David Cameron is not Michael Howard.

(ii) Labour loses between 15-25 seats and the Brown premiership descends into a John Major-type situation, constantly at the mercy of a few rebels while the momentum is with the opposition.

(iii) Labour loses its overall majority altogether while remaining the largest single party in a hung Parliament. Though this is the least likely outcome of the three, it remains a distinct possibility.

So following on from the previous post, which looked at Dave Cameron's chances of surviving a Tory defeat, what would happen to Gordon if scenario (iii) were actually to come to pass?

Well, he'd have to go, wouldn't he. Apart from anything else, he would look a complete and utter plonker for having squandered a majority of 66 with two and a half years of the Parliament left to go. His judgement and reputation as a supreme political strategist would be shot to pieces - for ever.

A hung Parliament with Labour as the largest party would almost certainly mean a coalition with the Lib Dems - but even if Sir Menzies Campbell was content to serve under his old pal Gordon, his MPs would not let him.

No, the price of such a coalition would be that Gordon would have to fall on his sword, with a new government formed under a caretaker Prime Minister while the Labour Party chose its new leader - who might of course turn out to be the careteaker leader himself.

So who would it be? Well, this is where the speculation about a Year of three Prime Ministers gets really interesting.

People have lazily assumed that if we are to have a third premier this year, it will be David Cameron, but given our skewed electoral system this is highly unlikely - which is why whatever he may say in public, Dave is still desperate for Gordon to back out.

No, if there is to be a third Prime Minister of 2007, it will be someone else entirely - probably a senior Cabinet minister who will be tasked with leading Labour and the coalition through the choppy waters that would follow Brown's inevitable demise.

Step forward, Mr Jack Straw.

Huhne not so ghastly after all

A friend has drawn my attention to this Diary piece in the Times last week in which Matthew Parris withdrew his unsubstantiated slur against "the indefinably ghastly Chris Huhne" published during the Lib Dem leadership contest in February 2006.

Long-standing readers may recall I was fairly critical of Matthew for this at the time and to his credit, he acknowledges as much, saying in his piece: "A noted blogger, Paul Linford, took me to task for this - with justice."

Hardly a ringing endorsement

The polls on this blog are not meant to be taken especially seriously - they are really there just to provide a bit of a talking point and to give users another way of interacting besides leaving comments. But the result of my recent survey on who should lead the Lib Dems into the next election makes interesting reading in my view.

The full result was as follows:

Sir Menzies Campbell 28%
Nick Clegg 22%
Charles Kennedy 21%
Chris Huhne 15%
None of these 11%

Given that a fair few of my readers are Tory and Labour supporters who might have voted for Sir Ming in the belief that a new Lib Dem leader might generate a recovery in the party's fortunes at their own parties' expense, this hardly constitutes a ringing endorsement. Neither does it demonstrate any clear consensus on who might replace Ming, with almost as many favouring a return to Charles Kennedy as backing leader-in-waiting Nick Clegg.

Still on the subject of the next election, a new poll is now running on when you think it will be held, within the available legal timeframe of autumn 2007 - spring 2010.

That Lib Dem reshuffle in full

Sarah Teather demoted, David Laws promoted. David Heath and Simon Hughes swap jobs. Er, that's it.

Seriously, it is high time Ming reshuffled himself. His credibility is shot to pieces over the Ashdown/Williams job offers, his support in the south is already under threat from Cameron's Liberal Toryism - and now Gordon Brown has stolen one of the key raisons d'etre of the Lib Dems and their predecessor parties over the past 30 years - the fact that they were the only ones committed to a thoroughgoing reform of our constitution and system of government.

At the last election, there were three other good reasons for voting Lib Dem - the fact that they had far and away the most decent of the three main party leaders in Charles Kennedy, their progressive taxation policies which would have benefited most hard-working families while making the absurdly rich pay a little bit more, and their opposition to the war in Iraq.

But Kennedy has gone, so have the progressive taxation policies, and Iraq won't be the defining issue in British politics forever. I am at a loss to know where on earth the Lib Dems go from here - and more importantly, so is Ming.

Brown and the Libs: Some Questions

Politics is not rocket science, and the motives of those who engage in it are usually pretty transparent, but to me, there are an unusually large number of unanswered questions about the strange affair of Gordon Brown's attempt to bring senior Lib Dems into his Cabinet. Here's a few that haven't already been exhaustively covered on today's blogosphere.

* What will be the effect of this on morale within the Labour Party? Now that Gordon Brown has made clear he believes he needs to look outside the party to construct his Cabinet, will Labour MPs feel that their 300-odd nominations have been flung back in their faces?

* Will Peter Hain still be Northern Ireland Secretary after next Wednesday? If so, how will he feel about the fact that his job was offered to Paddy Ashdown?

* Does the fact that Brown made that job offer mean that he is going to retain the territorial Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish departments in government rather than create an umbrella department of nations and regions as had been rumoured?

* Would Paddy Ashdown still have said no if he had been offered the job of Foreign Secretary (as, surely, he should have been if the alternatives are more of Maggie Beckett or a comeback for Jack Straw?)

* What was Ashdown up to leaking the story to the Guardian's editor Alan Rusbridger, when he must have realised this would cause ten tons of shit to descend on the head of his leader Ming Campbell? Was he just being vain, or has he too decided that Ming is a liability?

* Will the Lib Dems in fact blame Ming, or will they just see this as a rather devious manoeuvre by Brown to get the plaudits for appearing open and inclusive without having to suffer the inconvenience of actually having the Lib Dums in his Cabinet?

* Similarly, will the public really see this as an attempt by Brown to create a "new politics," or simply as a prime example of the way the old politics works, ie completely shafting the leader of an opposition party, who also happens to be an "old friend?"

* If Ming falls and a more media-friendly figure like Chris Huhne or Nick Clegg becomes leader, could the ultimate loser in the whole affair be David Cameron, with the "liberal Conservative" vote returning to the Lib Dems?

I don't profess to know the answer to any of these questions - but it seems there is enough food for thought here not only to keep the blogosphere occupied for days but to keep historians occupied for years.

Equidistance is now the only policy that makes sense

For a politician whose experience was supposed to be his greatest asset, Sir Menzies Campbell displayed an extremely poor grasp of recent political history in allowing his party's spring conference to be overshadowed by speculation about who the Lib Dems would back in a hung Parliament and the suggestion that they would sustain a minority Labour government in power.

Before anyone tries to exonerate Ming by blaming the rogue briefing on some lowly press officer, I don't think that whether or not this was "authorised" is really the issue. It should have been made absolutely crystal clear that the whole subject was in fact completely off-limits, and this Ming and his chief-of-staff Ed Davey clearly failed to do.

Had Ming made a closer study of the 1987 election campaign in which he was originally elected to Parliament, he would have realised why. The Alliance campaign that year was wrecked by the fact that David Steel and David Owen each gave different answers to the question - Steel saying it was "inconceivable" he could do a deal with Mrs Thatcher - still alive it seems - and Owen maintaining he could never work with Neil Kinnock.

Similarly, in 1992, all Labour's talk of PR in the last week of the campaign strengthened the impression that a Lib Dem vote was a vote for Kinnock, swinging vital votes back to the Tories at the eleventh hour.

Maybe Campbell was trying to follow the example of his predecessor-but-one Paddy Ashdown, who formally abandoned "equidistance" after that election and came clean about the fact that he wanted a coalition with New Labour. At the time, it made good politics, enabling the Lib Dems to benefit from the wave of tactical anti-Tory voting that swept the country in 1997 and, to a slightly lesser extent, in 2001.

But thanks to the phenomenon of "tactical unwind," those days are behind us now. It follows that positioning the Lib Dems too closely to either of the two main parties is likely to prove counter-productive, especially in what is likely to be a very close race.

It is clear that in some respects, the Lib Dems remain to the left of Labour, notably on Iraq. It is also fairly obvious that Ming Campbell is more of an ideological bedfellow with Gordon Brown than with David Cameron.

But that means they need to work doubly hard not to give the impression that a vote for Campbell is a vote for Labour. I can't imagine this being a mistake that Chris Huhne would have made.