"And then he said..."

News just breaking that the Tory shadow Home Secretary David Davis is resigning - not just from the shadow cabinet but from the House of Commons.

This will - of course - trigger a by-election in a key Lib Dem target seat. And the BBC report, sparse though it is, suggests that’s not just a side-effect of Davis’ decision, but the whole point of it.

This is what the Beeb’s report says at the moment (no doubt it will soon be expanded).

Shadow home secretary David Davis is set to resign as an MP, the BBC understands.

It is thought he wants to trigger a by-election in his Haltemprice and Howden seat.

Mr Davis has been a passionate opponent of plans to extend the terror detention limit to 42 days.

It is thought he has privately threatened to resign if the Tories wavered on the issue. He will make a statement shortly.

There is absolutely no way in which this is anything other than desperately bad news for David Cameron, who needs this like he needs a hole in the head.

I’ve always thought Davis was one of the better sort of Tories, and was much struck by a joint TV interview he did with Mark Oaten about civil liberties when the latter was the Lib Dem home affairs spokesperson.

They were barely distinguishable in what they said, which at the time I thought reflected more on Oaten than on Davis. But now I’m not so sure.

I suppose it’s too much to hope that this is all pre-arranged with Nick Clegg and Davis is going to re-stand at the by-election as a Lib Dem?

Edit: apparently, it is. He’ll be an independent, unopposed by us.

Our not standing against him is a sensible decision - but will the Tories put up a candidate? Cameron is spinning it as a jolly brave decision by a jolly fine chap.

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

Look - it’s close, OK? Too close for the difference to be meaningful. And it may not actually be good news for Huhne anyway. But there has been a small but measurable swing to him from Clegg in the attention they’re both receiving among bloggers.

The turning point was the Calamity Clegg dossier, which rather underlines the potential downside of this - the mere fact he’s being written about doesn’t guarantee that nice things are being said about him. But didn’t Oscar Wilde once argue that it was better to be notorious than unknown?

If you feed both their names into the BlogPulse trends tool from Nielsen and ask it to compare what proportion of the chatter in the blogosphere is about each of them, the results are interesting. Here’s the graph:

You can see very clearly that, apart from the spike caused by the launch of Huhne’s campaign, marginally more attention was paid to Clegg during the first two thirds of the campaign. There wasn’t much clear air between them (compared with what you get if you add John Hemming to the mix, or even CK or Vince after the first ‘will they stand?’ flurry was over) but you could see a slight advantage.

And then came the day of the dossier - Huhne attracts more interest, for obvious reasons, but he managed to keep at least a marginal advantage for most of the time since then - although there’s a hint in the last couple of days that they may be even again.

So what does it mean? Not a great deal, probably, except that Huhne has once again managed to muscle his way into the forefront of people’s attention. How good a thing this is for him and the party depends on what they’re actually saying.

And, of course, neither are exactly setting the world apart compared with more important issues like Britney Spears:

“Taking Christ out of Christmas is like serving the Christmas turkey without the stuffing,” says Tory MP Mark Pritchard. As both a pagan and a vegetarian, I’ll have to take his word for it…

With time running out in the Lib Dem leadership election, I’ve finally thought of something that might make me vote – even though the one thing I’ve been certain of all along is that I don’t want either candidate in charge of my party.

When the election kicked off I was desperately hoping a third candidate would emerge so I wasn’t stuck with the unappealing choice between a candidate I didn’t rate and a candidate I didn’t like. Anyone would have done - John Hemming even - but no such luck.

Chris Huhne had failed to impress me as a possible leader during the previous contest. I seem to remember writing at the time that a grey man in a grey suit could never be a successful leader of a political party which needed to fight for every scrap of attention.

And since then I’ve learned from contacts that his press connections from his time as a journalist don’t necessarily represent a reservoir of stored-up goodwill that he can exploit. The broadsheet hack and ex-subordinate of Huhne who told me “a more self-contented man you will rarely find” didn’t strike me as itching to write positive pieces about how well the Lib Dems were doing under his leadership.

My problem with Clegg, on the other hand, stems from his manner - he flunked the all-important ‘first impressions’ test quite spectacularly when I met him and the famous charm that’s supposed to make him the great communicator simply repelled me.

Distilled to its basics, he seemed false - that deadly quality the Big Brother / I’m a Celebrity worshipping masses despise above all others (except being a nonce, or an asylum seeker, or the manager of the England football team).

Nevertheless, I was prepared to consider voting for him as leader when the contest started. I was aware that, while my objection to Huhne was based on his abilities, my objection to Clegg was based on a personal prejudice that others might not share. Plus, the press wanted him as leader and after what they did to Ming I couldn’t see the point in disobeying.

Not so now.

Clegg’s stuttered his way through the campaign, showing flashes of the qualities his supporters revere but no consistent demonstration of Messiahdom. Like the perfect ripe peach, he’s beautiful to look at but bruises dreadfully the moment he’s thrown to the floor and kicked around a bit.

Consider it this way: if Nick Clegg were a yachtsman he’d win every single fair-weather race handily, leaving his rivals trailing in his wake as he cruised nonchalantly into the distance with a glass of chilled white in one hand and a cute blonde on his other arm.

But in foul weather racing he wouldn’t make it to the first marker buoy before disaster struck and he sank like a stone, struggling feebly as he disappeared beneath the waves.

So where would Chris Huhne be, in that overstretched and laboured metaphor?

Not in the race at all - he’d be in a submarine underneath it, ready and waiting to torpedo the leader. One moment the hot favourite is sailing serenely along, the next they’re fatally holed below the waterline and Huhne’s sewing another bar onto his Jolly Roger.

It’s a talent he has, and he’s demonstrated it in both leadership contests so far. Campbell’s aura of gravitas - gone. Clegg’s reputation for communication - gone. It may not win him the race, but it leaves his victims fatally weakened and easy meat for the circling sharks of the press and the other parties to devour at their leisure.

Which is a pretty good argument to vote for him in this leadership contest, when you think about it.

And I am thinking about it, seriously. Because if he can do that to our chaps, think what he can do to the enemy.

From being ‘definitely not Huhne, but twist my arm and I might vote Clegg’, I’ve now moved to exactly the opposite position.

You see, the way I look at it, our next leader has just one task beyond the basic one of demonstrating the minimum level of competence to avoid the party being laughed at - and that’s to nobble David Cameron by fair means or foul.

The Labour government was crumbling long before Gordon Brown took charge of it - his task was to stick his thumb in the dyke and delay the inevitable for as long as possible. He’s in the process of failing, thanks in part to Twinkletoes Cable’s surgically precise brutality.

So that’s half the task done already, but if Cameron is still on the field of play at the next election it won’t help us as we’ll be hit from both sides: a resurgent Tory party and a Labour ’stop the Tories’ scare campaign.

Be clear on this: the threat isn’t from the Conservative Party as a whole - when seen in bulk they’re still the same mix of swivel-eyed loons and chinless nonentities they’ve been for years. The threat is from Cameron, who has the knack of making you ignore the rest of the party and concentrate instead on the handfuls of magical pixie dust he’s throwing in the air to obscure them.

Remove Cameron, however you do it, and there’s no-one to replace him. End result: ice cream and jelly for Liberal Democrats.

Based on his performance so far, Chris Huhne might just be the man to kick Cameron in the knackers. He won’t rely solely on the power of argument, and he won’t be content (as Ming told me he was) to wait for Cameron to self-destruct.

And I hate the Tories with such visceral loathing that I’m almost keen to see how he’d do it.

Based on his handling of Clegg, he’ll twist something Cameron once said into something it didn’t actually mean, and then dominate the agenda by endlessly demanding the poor sod clarify what he meant by it.

Instead of skipping gaily through the flowers saying “hullo clouds, hullo sky” like Fotherington-Tomas, Cameron will find himself tearing his hair out repeatedly denying he ever suggested that single mothers should have their children taken away from them or that a 15ft wall should be erected on the English-Welsh border.

The trouble with us Lib Dems is that, ‘dirty tricks’ bleating from by-election losers notwithstanding, we play far too fair with our opponents. While they spout nonsense about how ‘just one vote for the Lib Dems in this seat will let Margaret Thatcher / Neil Kinnock eat your babies’, we hop up and down feebly saying ‘um, excuse me, that’s not actually true’ and getting ignored.

If the only way to destroy Cameron is to lie, cheat, mangle the truth, hit below the belt and generally behave like a cross between Karl Rove and Ric Flair, then maybe that’s the way we should play it.

And one thing’s for sure - Nick Clegg’s not the right man for that particular job. Because if we’re about to march willingly towards the special hell reserved for bad politicians, we at least need to make sure the man leading us there is capable of killing, not wounding, when he strikes the blow that sends us that way.

So I’m really, really tempted to vote Huhne.

Except, even as my pen’s hovering over my naked ballot paper, there’s a part of me saying “No - it shouldn’t be that way”.

Maybe the political reality is that we need to play the man, not the ball. But I’ve never been very good with reality. I don’t want to live in a world where that sort of tactic is the right sort of tactic. And I don’t really want to endorse it with my vote.

So that’s where I am at the moment. And if you’re a Huhnista and you’ve read this far - leave a comment and give me a reason to vote for him.

Don’t base it on his policies, because I don’t care about policy. Both candidates passed the PPC selection process, so they’re ideologically sound and that’s good enough for me.

Don’t base it on his personality, because I don’t think he’s got much of one and I don’t particularly like what he has got.

Don’t base it on his ability to communicate, because if what you’re communicating is wrong then the better you are it the more damage you do.

Don’t base it on how I’ve got him all wrong and he’s actually a nice guy, because that will remove the only quality that makes him worth voting for in my eyes.

Instead, reassure me that he’ll be as lethal aiming outwards as he has been aiming inwards.

Because if I’m going to sell my soul to the Devil, I want to be as sure as possible that the reward will have been worth the cost to my idealism.

Numerous things to write about - Christmas Day on the Cornish cliffs with Beloved Other Half, dashing across Heathrow Airport in the rain to meet Ali before her flight to LA, good books by Gordon Ramsay and Monty Don to review - but they can wait for another day.

Instead, here's a really easy way to make a difference to the lives of people in developing countries. It's not charity - all being well, you get your money back - and you can cough up as little as $25, which is not much more than a tenner for those of us on this side of the pond.

I came across Kiva on Heck's Kitchen, where Jenny Miller and her housemates have evidently been spreading their dollars around to good effect. What Kiva does is simple: it acts as one central partner for a whole raft of microfinance organisations around the globe, making it easy for the likes of you and me to send small sums of money via PayPal to help fund small businesses in cash-poor parts of the world.

You can choose to send your $25 (or more - I've loaned $300) to Ugandan seamstresses, Azeri taxi drivers, Ecuadorean farmers or electricians in the Gaza Strip. Other people around the world also chip in, and when the requested sum is raised the money is passed to the borrower. The microfinance organisation supervises the repayments. You don't get interest, but you do get a warm rosy glow.

I've split my fee for a day's work, more or less, between three African businesses:

• Justina Azamachi in Ghana sells frozen food to an established customer base, but lacks storage facilities to expand.
• Joseph Onyango in Kenya is a dressmaker with a large family, including a badly disabled son, to support. He has a full order book, but needs to invest in stock and equipment.
• Denise Tidatoa in Togo supports her family selling basic goods such as canned food and soap. She plans to lease a shop and increase her stock.

They seem such small ambitions when you look at the details - help with buying a sewing machine, a deep freezer, or some pasta - but at the same time they're huge. They represent an income, schooling or medical treatment for a family, independence.

They also represent an investment in the future of the countries involved. Bulgaria joined the EU a few days ago and the newspapers over here were full of dire predictions about how the UK would be swamped by swarthy economic migrants. Well, through Kiva, you can finance Bulgarian shopkeepers, printers, tradesmen and farmers who are trying to make a go of it in their home country. Repayments from businesses in Gaza have been a bit erratic recently, for obvious reasons, but surely the future in that troubled part of the world must in part depend on the establishment of a viable economy? And so it goes on, around the globe.

As schemes go, this one strikes me as a really good investment - of time (it's quick and easy) and of money too.

Just to clear up any ambiguity caused by this post on Northern Irish uber-blog Slugger O'Toole, let me state clearly that I have no inside knowledge of whose hands have been delving into Lembit Opik's underpants, or for how long.

A few days ago, when the news broke that the Lib Dem MP had split up with fiancee Sian Lloyd and was now shagging a Cheeky Girl, I remembered a souvenir I still have of my days in student politics - one of Lembit's election leaflets for his unsuccessful run for President of the National Union of Students. Headlined Like it? You'll Lembit, it features a photo of him sitting in a rubbish skip, with the caption “I'll never be too proud to take a tip”. I thought, “I could give you a tip or two right now, matey”.

What I forgot, though, was a comment I'd posted on Paul Staines' / Guido Fawkes' blog, back in June, when he ran a caption competition with a photo of the Lib Dem candidate in the Bromley by-election surrounded by Cheeky Girls.

My entry? I'm just looking after them for Lembit.

Slugger O'Toole blogger Belfast Gonzo tries to spin this into a suggestion that I might have had insider knowledge that the Opik-Irimia relationship had been going on longer than anyone had officially admitted. He (she?) does quote the bit on my blog where I say I'm an ex journalist and former politician, which ought to suggest I'm no sort of insider at all, but seems to decide it means exactly the opposite - presumably on the grounds that all politicians and journos are lying bastards anyway, aren't they?

Actually, I was just making a vague allusion to the Popbitch rumour about the un-named high-flying MP who was generously rewarded for driving two female party colleagues to conference, and had no idea what was in the stars for the asteroid-fearing, gravitationally-challenged Parliamentarian.

But now a horrible thought has gripped me.

What if he saw the caption?

What if it was me who put the idea in his head?

I may give up this blogging business altogether - it's obviously too bloody dangerous…

When I fell on Friday I didn't hear the heavy, muffled sound, like a thick bar of chocolate being snapped in its wrapper, that heralded my broken foot of a few years ago. That was some small consolation as I floundered on the ground in the dark, sick with shock and unable to stand, wondering whether I'd have to crawl back to the office on hands and knees. I'd fallen victim to a lack of street lighting and a pothole big enough to relocate the Eden Project to, wrenching my left foot to what must have been the limit of its endurance. And believe me, it hurt.

In the end I pulled myself upright, hopped back to the office, and sat unseen on some garden furniture while I took stock. No chocolate-bar noise = nothing broken. Grazed knee = painful irritant at most. No torn clothing, though one boot was badly gouged. Result: drive home and count yourself lucky. So I did, and found that I couldn't bring myself to top 50mph on any of the motorways, much to the irritation of a Polish trucker who had greater ambitions. Now, a day later, the foot has swelled up like a balloon and gifted me a limp that might politely be called a conversation piece.

Plenty of opportunity for conversation, too, as we continued our house hunting and then dropped in on my parents. We looked at two houses today, but neither turned out to be goers: one was large but bland and the other was wonderfully individualistic but impractically small. Ah well.

Of course, we want the impossible - space, privacy, lots of rooms, parking for two cars, a garden big enough to let tortoises roam while still allowing plenty of space for a vegetable plot, with a good rail link to London (my home town in North Hertfordshire is where we are mainly looking) and of course within our budget. Oh - and one more important criterion: the vendor must be prepared to actually sell it. We had, in fact, found somewhere that met every single one of our requirements, at the price of needing a lot of work, but our making an offer so unnerved the owner that she promptly took it off the market. Nothing we've visited since has quite hit the spot - though we were tempted by another place that looked good until we inspected the alley at the foot of the garden and found it ankle-deep in empty beer cans.

Life, in fact, has thrown a succession of huge things at us in a quite overwhelming manner. I can't even begin to list them, but the weight of the world on our shoulders has been such that writing about it has seemed trivial and impossible. Hence the silence in this blog, which celebrated its fourth birthday (in its DeadJournal form) a few days ago with no fanfare and without pomp and ceremony - or even jelly and ice cream. I don't want to stop writing, but I'm going through a patch where actually sitting down and doing it seems nearly impossible. I have taken one positive step, though - removed myself from Lib Dem Blogs. I realised, in the end, that being on it was a cause of my creative block - I was feeling a responsibility to be serious and sonorous, and to think great thoughts, and that prevented me from just posting as I used to. So now that's gone, at least for the time being. When I've finished migrating all my posts and comments since November 2002 to the newest version of this journal then I'll put back a feed that just includes any political posts I make. Until then, the Lib Dems will just have to manage without me.

It's not like I could deliver leaflets anyway, with this foot…

No “Modern Manners” cartoon this week - I was up until almost 4 meeting a publisher’s deadline and am too tired to be witty. I don’t imagine anyone will miss it, anyway.

Strip number three: conversational gambits, wristband etiquette and that resignation…

Built using Witty Comics

Strip number two: meanwhile, out in the desert somewhere…

Built using Witty Comics