"And then he said..."

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:

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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.

I'm taking part in a discussion at the moment that asks people why they first joined the Lib Dems. I got so many good memories writing my answer that I thought I'd cross-post an expanded verion of it here.

I chased a Liberal leafletter down the street as a schoolboy to say “can I help?”

I delivered and canvassed for a while - particularly for the unfortunate George Binney in 1983 who achieved 20,000 votes and still got buried in a landslide - but didn't actually join until the merger debate. I was signed up into the SDP on a nod and a wink (ie, no fee, not sure the paperwork ever got sent off) so I could attend the North Herts SDP meeting to discuss which way to go, with Danny Finkelstein vs Shirley Williams as guest cheerleaders for the rival factions. We all went one way, Danny and a philosphical, sad-eyed gentleman named (I think) Pedro went the other.

The first time I think I was a real member was later as a student, at the UEA, where I fell in with a bad crowd in the Alliance Students. Those were heady days - Lembit Opik was running for NUS glory on a platform of “Students for Students” using the slogan “Like it? You'll Lembit”, a gerbil was elected as our SU general secretary, in all other respects the union was in the iron grip of the Labour Club until Richard Grayson cut their feet from under them, the Norwich skyline was smoky from the burning of Poll Tax registration forms and we held internal Alliance Students elections by means of a unique version of the secret ballot in which the candidates closed their eyes and eveybody else took part in a show of hands.

I drifted off to the Greens for a couple of years (the malign influence of my ex-fiancee), had a weird 1992 general election day helping Chris Fowler in South Norfolk and then attending the Norwich North count for the Greens, and finally defected to the Lib Dems (or whatever we were called then) at the local elections the following year - I agreed to stand as a Green, tried to withdraw, but found I was one of only a handful of Norwich Green candidates with valid nomination papers and felt compelled to go through with it. At the count in my ward, watched only by my Labour opponent, his flunkies, and my two tellers (both Labour voters) I announced I was leaving the Greens. Norwich Labour smirked until I pulled a gold rosette out of my pocket. Later that night I was thrown out of the Labour Club while enjoying a pint with an old friend in the People's Party. Things went downhill for the Norwich Labour Party thereafter :o)

Since then I've been stoutly Lib Dem (very stoutly until I joined Vince Cable's gym last year) and, in 1996-97 or so, finally read enough policy and political philosophy to understand why. So no more wobbles, and an ideological basis to my membership this last decade. I was a council candidate in 1998 and 2002, and probably will be again this year, and stood for Parliament in 2001. In 2003 I burned out and thought 'sod that for a lark', but I'm making a bit of a comeback at the moment.

But why did I originally join? Damned if I know. I think it was because I liked to support the underdog. Do you know, this leadership campaign we've just had is the first time I can ever remember supporting the favourite in anything since that night with Finkelstein and Williams?

With the result of the leadership election just hours away, it's time to look at the winners and losers from the campaign.

Winners

Chris Huhne

Transforming himself from Who-ne? to the Huhnami, the Eastleigh MP won the campaign even if he doesn't turn out to have won the leadership. Where he was once just one among many talented new MPs, he's now leapfrogged his rivals in the most dramatic style. And the national exposure won't have done his wafer-thin constituency majority any harm, either.

Jo Swinson

The baby of the House has been one of the more visible faces of both the Ming Campbell and Reflecting Britain campaigns. Possibly not the most obvious choice to become the highest-profile young MP, she has nevertheless looked comfortable in the spotlight and performed well.

Charles Kennedy

We didn't know how much we loved him until we didn't have him any more. Kennedy's involuntary defenestration was emphatically not the party's finest hour, but the man himself has come out of it smelling of roses (and with a lot less weight to carry on his shoulders). His Dunfermline walkabout was the stuff of legends. Which brings us to:

Willie Rennie

It really doesn't matter what the man does with the rest of his life, wherever two or three Liberal Democrats are gathered together, he will be forever acclaimed a hero. He could be caught buggering one of the Queen's corgis and it wouldn't make any difference - he stopped the party from sliding into derision and irrelevance, and nobody will ever forget it.

Martin Tod

Much of Ming Campbell's campaign was dire, but its use of the internet was enviable - and that was down to Tod. There was nothing wrong with Huhne's web work, nor Hughes's once he ditched that dreadful Flash site, but Ming's was a cut above in slickness and innovativeness, and made the rest of the party look good by association.

Lynne Featherstone

Those of us who remember her as the leader of a freshly-minted three-strong Lib Dem council group will not be remotely surprised if her determination eventually hands her the keys to Downing Street. Until that day comes, her effectiveness as Chris Huhne's number one supporter - half pom-pommed cheerleader, half bowler-hatted Odd Job - should ensure a higher profile front bench job whoever wins.

Alex Wilcock

A very great many words were expended fighting this campaign in blogs, with some consistently excellent writers at work (and kudos to Ryan Cullen for gathering them all together on Lib Dem Blogs). And then Alex quietly appeared with a blog that he swore was as much about Dr Who and his partner as it was about politics, and blew everyone else away. His three posts on the leadership contenders would make forests weep for the trees sacrificed to provide the newsprint wasted on 'professional' analysis that wasn't a quarter as well-argued or persuasive.

John Hemming

When the millionaire MP started publicly toying with the idea of standing for the leadership the howls of laughter were deafening. But then a funny thing happened - others began to leap into the water revealed by Hemming's decision to break the ice and the man himself tactfully withdrew, leaving him looking like a far-sighted trailblazer. He followed it up with what was generally considered to be a successful podcast with the influential but scurrilous bloggers Guido Fawkes and Recess Monkey, who were presumably planning on kippering him but who seem to have ended up quite liking him.

Losers

Mark Oaten

Forget the scandal - Oaten's campaign was already over before the story of the male prostitute broke. It's difficult not to feel sorry for the almost Shakespearian destruction of his hopes, ambitions and life, and impossible not to admire his return to the House of Commons to help defeat the government by one vote. But, essentially, before the leadership election Oaten was being talked about by some as the future of the party - and by the time the News of the World mugged him he was already history.

Ming Campbell

He may win the leadership (with the help of my vote) but he lost the campaign. On the defensive from the start, he had no answer to the Huhne Army's attack: as the front runner and the possessor of the greatest reputation for leadership in the party, the only way to go was down - but many were disappointed by how quickly he descended.

Lembit Öpik

Since he was a student activist, Lembit's reputation among those who have given him a fair hearing has been that of an effective achiever who uses humour to surprising effect, and is frequently underestimated because of it. However, his dogged defence of Kennedy and Oaten - beyond the point when any other man would have folded his tent and melted silently into the night - has expended most of his hard-earned political capital. Most of the reputation for success has evaporated, leaving only the reputation for silliness.

Nick Clegg

The Sheffield Hallam MP is fast becoming the Lib Dems' Portillo - charming, talented, but lacking the instinct for the right moment to strike. Why didn't he run for leader? There are many possible answers, but few reflect well on him, given Chris Huhne's bravery and success in seizing the moment.

The Daily Telegraph

“Scandal-hit Lib Dems in freefall” my foot! Dishonourable mention goes to Simon Jenkins in The Times for “Kennedy may be finished - but so is his absurd, irrelevant party”.

Sarah Teather

The Kennedy Assassination was not popular, but in my conversations with activists no-one has been more personally blamed than the Brent East MP - perhaps because everyone knows that Kennedy practically took up residence in her constituency to get her elected in the first place.

Ben Ramm

Oscar Wilde once said it is better to be notorious than to be unknown. Ramm, the editor of a magazine that no-one had ever heard of and which appears to never be published, proved it is possible to be both similtaneously.

Daisy McAndrew

Did she shaft her former boss at the behest of secret plotters, or did she just do her job as a political correspondent? Her failure to mention her prior connections when reporting the story of Kennedy's drinking was a clear failure of journalistic ethics - and whichever is true, a lot of people will be talking a lot more carefully in her presence in future.

I have finally allowed my name to be included on Ming Campbell's list of website supporters - somewhat late in the day, I admit, but it seemed the right time at last.

Anyone who's been following this journal right through from when I stopped writing about buttocks, dead people, shopping trollies and the North Circular, and started writing about politics, will remember it took me quite a while to decide to vote for him. Initially I planned to write in Charles Kennedy's name.

Looking back at the posts I've written, I see a steady journey to get where I am today. The leadership campaign progressed, too, with the big story being Chris Huhne's surge. It seems to me that it started with a general expectation of a Campbell victory (a Steve Bell cartoon warned “Ask not for whom the Ming mongs - it mongs for you”) and was then thrown into confusion by his stumble at PMQs. It stayed confused for some time until the Huhne Army started its march. But now, in the final stages, it seems to have settled down and swung back to Ming. Certainly there has been a recent fightback online, as suggested by the increased number of bloggers declared for him (see here and later entries on Pigeon Post and here on the Campbell Campaign blog). I also sense that Simon might have a little wind back in his sails - though probably not enough to make a difference.

So I suspect it will all come down to the following factors:

• When did the majority of people vote? Was it at the height of the Huhne blitzkreig? Or before, when ballot papers first arrived and people lunged at their initial choices, or will it happen in a day or two at the last possible moment?
• Are the late voters soft Campbellites and soft Hughes supporters, waiting to see if Huhne does enough to convince them to vote against their initial favourite? And, if they are, will he?
• Is the Huhne phenomenon an internet and media thing, or does it extend to the armchair, offline, non politics-junky membership?
• How will the areas with the greatest membership - London especially - vote? Did Simon's lacklustre mayoral campaign kill him stone dead in the capital, or will his years as the sole London MP see him through?
• If, as seems likely, Simon is third, where will his transfers go? Will they split broadly equally, will they go to Huhne because Hughes fans like an underdog and don't like Campbell, or will they go to Campbell because his supporters will pick the other famous name over a moderniser with a taint of the Orange Book about him?

For what it's worth, my view is that the bulk of votes were cast at the height of Huhne's surge, which will obviously help him a lot. I think he'll pick up very few of the late votes - if people were going to be swayed by him they would have been by now. I think London will (in many cases reluctantly) not favour Simon but will shade towards Huhne, as will Simon's transfers - but not by much in either case.

I think the combination of those factors will ensure that Huhne runs it very close, but I still think Ming will win. The two of them did not start equal, Campbell was the favourite and Huhne was the one nobody had heard of. He needed a massive swing his way just to get in the game. He got that massive swing, but all it did is make him a genuine contender. I don't think it's made him the winner.

But of course - no-one really knows anything at the moment. We could all be wrong.

It's kinda fun, really.

Another Lib Dem AGM last night - this time the Brentford and Isleworth branch. They'd tempted Ed Davey MP down from the House of Commons to be the guest speaker. Brave man - he took the train, which to Isleworth is the sort of adventure that often ends in tears. You expect to find Marlon Brando at the end of your journey, muttering “the horror, the horror”. During the 2000 GLA elections we surveyed passengers there on what they thought of the service - one replied saying the station was “like a scene from psycho”.

Ed's a good speaker, and he performed well. The message was “optimism! ambition!”, and he overran the time he'd planned to be with us. This presented a problem as he had to be back at the House for the Iraq debate. We gave him a lift back to Isleworth station - but since the driver never returned, I suspect he may have driven him all the way to Westminster. Hope he made it.

The logic behind Ed's optimism was that, although there have been good periods for the Lib Dems / Liberals in the past, never before have we have had so much credibility as a serious party. And the Iraq debate looks to have been a good example of that. The government tries to side-step the question of whether Parliament should have a say over military action. Backbench Labour MPs rebel. What does the opposition crystallise around? A Lib Dem motion. The Tories - the 'official' opposition - support the government. But someone's got to stand up to Blair and remind him he's democratically accountable.

This last month has been a bit frantic politically, and it will get worse before it gets better, but there has been other stuff going on too. Went out to the allotment both mornings at the weekend, trimming back brambles and a small oak tree that was being choked by them. There were nettles that had literally grown ten feet tall in an attempt to get some leaves into the open air above the bramble thicket. I bought a rather nifty hand saw, with a blade that retracts into its handle and a clip to attach it to your belt. I'm a sucker for belt-mounted gimmicks. I also bought a huge back-support belt - it looked like something a weightlifter would wear but it did the job. I'm still getting twinges of back pain but nothing like what I feared I was in for. Lisa gathered up some windfall apples that had fallen onto our patch from a neighbouring semi-derelict one - me, being Mr Picky, was very dubious about them but ate them last night in pancakes without remembering where they'd come from… and thought them very fine indeed. Much to my surprise, I'm really into this allotment idea. Never would have thought it.