Not many people know this, but next week will be Nick Clegg’s third annual conference as Liberal Democrat leader. It often seems as if he is still awaiting his debut. The last two conferences were overshadowed by falling pieces of financial masonry (Northern Rock then Lehman Bros) and thus the leader was overshadowed by Vince Cable, who was settling in to his role as Sage of Twickenham. Next week Mr Clegg will have to think of how he, personally, can shine.
The Vince phenomenon has been a mixed blessing for the Lib Dems. A party that struggles to find a place in the national debate saw its deputy leader catapulted from relative obscurity to national treasure status. He frequently bested his opposite numbers, Alistair Darling and George Osborne, both strategically and rhetorically. Indeed, a new poll shows that more Tory voters trust Cable than Osborne. Yet for all the plaudits, the best-selling book and the much hailed media appearances, this has had strikingly little impact on the party’s poll rating. Cable appears to be liked by the public because he is a pundit, regarded as above party politics. Mr Cable has been invited to quick-step with pop stars, and write bestselling books. But the Lib Dems, as a party, have benefited very little.
The tragedy, for Mr Clegg, is all the greater because he has been strikingly surefooted in his leadership in the last 12 months. He has helped expose the government over its mistreatment of the Gurkhas, was the first to call on Michael Martin to resign as Speaker, and agitated to cancel parliament’s summer recess in order to clean up politics. Clegg and his close allies can also claim to be leading the policy debate, setting out a school liberalisation agenda before the Tories, and they have gone much further in spelling out how they will cut public spending. They have announced their intention to freeze public sector pay, including a reduction in the high earners wage bill, cancel tax credits to the middle classes, thus abolishing the so-called baby bond, and scrap Trident.
Under Mr Clegg, the party has grown up considerably — from policy to presentation. But it is not yet trusted as a potential party of government. Its poll ratings are currently becalmed somewhere in the high teens — good by historical standards and certainly a marked improvement from Ming Campbell levels. But the party has yet to capitalise on the collapse of Labour support. The rise of minority parties is a constant reminder of the Lib Dems’ difficulty in harvesting the growing ‘anti’ politics vote. In crude power politics terms, the poll rating may even be too high. Were the party doing a little worse, and Labour a little better, this would open up the prospect of a hung parliament with Mr Clegg as kingmaker.
In the nine months left until the likely election, Mr Clegg needs to find a way out of this no-man’s land. He has decided to stop chasing Tory marginal seats, and start wooing disaffected Labour voters, especially in the metropolitan north and pockets of London and the south-east. This shows that lessons have been learned from the ill-fated ‘decapitation’ strategy of the last election campaign, where the party failed to dislodge even the most vulnerable targets such as Oliver Letwin in Dorset West. This time the party knows it will be fighting a defensive battle in the south and the west — and that its target seats must come from elsewhere.
But how to sound different from the other two parties? Charles Kennedy was gifted the issue of the Iraq war, and picked up millions of protest votes from disaffected Labour activists. This time there is the potential for Mr Clegg to call for withdrawal from Afghanistan, where British troops have been making no progress and the political commitment to their mission seems shaky from both Labour and the cost-conscious Conservatives. But while the campaign in Helmand becomes increasingly salient with the voters as the casualties mount, it does not quite have the mass appeal of Iraq. Clegg is a liberal interventionist by instinct and the Afghan mission is fundamentally different in that it has the support of the international community. It is not the source of easy anti-war points.
Then there is always the imposing figure of Lord Ashdown, who not only believes in the conflict but would have been the man in charge of sorting it out had his appointment not been scuppered at the last minute by Hamid Karzai. Ashdown himself has no power of veto — but if he were to distance himself from Mr Clegg it might portray Lib Dem opposition to the war as opportunistic. Lord Ashdown is far from an interfering ex-leader — his interest is very much on faraway shores — but he still has a strong appeal to the grass-roots of the party and the public.
Yet for all these obstacles, there are signs of a better future looming for Clegg and the Lib Dems. Gordon Brown has already taken Labour to its lowest opinion poll rating since the Great War, but he may not be finished yet. The Lib Dems were, in a recent ComRes poll, three points behind Labour. Given that the party typically puts on four or five points during an election campaign, there is a great opportunity for it to force Labour into third place in the popular vote. Such a status would not be reflected in the House of Commons, as Westminster’s notoriously unfair voting system would leave them with far fewer seats than the party they bested. But they could sit in Westminster as Labour starts its civil war, and wait to welcome any defectors.
But for this golden scenario to unfold, Mr Clegg needs to make himself heard. The Lib Dem conference is perhaps the best platform he will have to do this until the next general election. All he has to do is make himself — not his ballroom-dancing deputy — the star of the show that opens in Bournemouth next week.
Alasdair Murray is director of CentreForum, the liberal think-tank.
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