Chris Huhne and whose army?

The Lib Dem leadership will be a closer affair than many people expect. Chris Huhne having run before and got a respectable 40 odd percent of vote is going to give Nick Clegg a decent run for his money. Indeed, Mike Smithson points out that today’s YouGov poll shows that Huhne has a slight edge over Clegg among Lib Dem supporters. Add to this the fact that Lib Dem activists tend to be a fairly left-wing lot who might find Clegg a little too right-wing for their tastes and it is not inconceivable that Huhne could pull off a surprise victory.

Yet, if Huhne won he’d immediately have a huge problem: he wouldn’t have the confidence of the Parliamentary party. At the moment Huhne has 10 MPs backing him compared to the 27 who are supporting Clegg and it is almost certain that by the time the vote comes round Clegg will have the support of a majority of Lib Dem MPs; he is only five away from having an absolute majority now. So if Huhne were to win, he—like IDS before him—would have been imposed on his colleagues against their will by the party members. When things get tough, his fellow MPs would feel little loyalty towards him as he was not their choice and little compunction at throwing him under the bus. A Huhne victory would bring about another period of turbulence for the Lib Dems.