The Liberal Democrats
It appears to me that at the moment Charles Kennedy is going to stand as leader in an election, all the main candidates have said they won't stand, leaving only Simon Hughes.This clearly would be such a disaster it obviously won't happen. So I suppose one of three things will. Most likely is Kennedy will be impressed upon to change his mind about remaining leader much like Mrs-Thatcher was in 1990, thus releasing Ming, Oaten etc from their pledges. Two, Ming, Oaten etc will just not keep to their pledges anyway - 'after overwhelming representations over the last few days and our negative showing in the opinion polls thus for the good of the party', or three, there'll be some compromise or rule-change.
Or I'm completely wrong. The only real conclusion is that not all publicity is good publicity, and now we have the grotesque spectacle of a leader battling with the booze, having lied to his party and his public, owning up after being threatened with outing by his own senior party members to ITV news (this last bit is a real Lib Dem moment - who in the world would out a major story to ITV news?) because same members were too scared to mount a leadership challenge.
No outcome is anything other than disastrous. Kennedy obviously can't stay leader, not for a second. Electorally we now now have a Scottish, ginger, recovering alcoholic who can't be trusted (I can perfectly understand why he lied about it, but this doesn't make it a good idea). Ths is unlikely to appeal in marginals. Both Ming and Oaten appear to be as decisive as Prince Charles choosing his ties. Hughes is Hughes. There are some others but it appears unlikely they will come through. We might as well write them off and get on with discussing how their 20% vote share will split between Labour and Conservative.
Finally I should note that alcoholism is a serious illness and not a joking matter, whatever dear George's funeral coverage implied.
Update: James Graham has some good thoughts, particularly that Cameron's lurch to the left (which seems pretty real at the moment) has meant the Lib Dems can't lurch to the right. I really wonder though to what extent they'll be a Lib Dems to do the lurching.
posted by Matthew @ 1/06/2006 08:25:00 AM
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