Nick Clegg's secret reasons to be cheerful

His party may be struggling to reach double digits in the polls, but Nick Clegg is entitled to feel smug as he heads to Glasgow for this year’s Lib Dem conference. This gathering, the penultimate one before the general election, has long been circled in Westminster diaries as the moment when a challenge to his leadership would emerge. But Clegg will arrive free from any threats to his position.

Not even the coalition’s defeat over Syria has destabilised Clegg. If, in May 2010, you had told a Liberal Democrat that their leader would back the coalition going to war in the Middle East without a UN mandate and then lose a Commons vote on it, he or she would have said that he’d be finished. But even though 24 of 57 Lib Dem MPs didn’t back Clegg and the government’s motion, there’s no talk of a leadership challenge.

Clegg can thank Chris Huhne, the man he beat for the leadership six years ago, for this. The Lib Dem victory in the Eastleigh by-election, prompted by Huhne’s guilty plea, reassured the party that it wasn’t facing wipeout at the next election. Clegg is also helped by the fact that he is not a drag on the party’s fortunes among the quarter of the electorate who might actually vote for the Liberal Democrats. Those who detest him are those who wouldn’t vote for the party anyway.

But Clegg will not be out of the woods until after the European elections next year. The party will probably finish fourth and — ironically — because these elections use a proportional system, they’ll suffer particularly heavy losses. Insiders predict that their nine MEPs will be reduced to two. ‘If there’s going to be an issue, it’ll be after the European elections’, one figure from the potentially troublesome part of the party says.