Dinner with Dale

Top Tory blogger Iain Dale came to Oxford last night, speaking at a joint event hosted by the Oxford Union and the student Conservatives. I got wind of the invitation about a month ago, and immediately dashed off an email to Ed Waldegrave, the Vice-President of the Union. The slightly quirky debating society usually treats its guest speakers to dinner beforehand, and there are usually half a dozen spaces for the President’s mates ordinary students to come along. I told Ed a load of guff about being a talented and influential Lib Dem blogger; somehow, he bought it, and I got my invite.

When I told my Lib Dem friends that I was going for dinner with Iain Dale, they were slightly underwhelmed. A certain blogger (who shall remain nameless) suggested I slip something in his drink, and I’m not entirely sure he was joking. For my part, I was quite excited. It’s always fascinating to pick the brains of an experienced political commentator, and arguably even more useful if it’s someone you disagree with.

I arrived at the Union at 7pm, and met the other guests, who turned out to be the committee of the student Conservatives, almost in its entirety. I was feeling a little outnumbered. I made small talk for a few minutes, reassured myself that they were real, warm-blooded human beings, took a deep breath, and outed myself as a Liberal Democrat. We made our way up to the Poetry Room – a cosy little annexe to the Union’s library, which had been neatly laid out for dinner – and started on the wine.

Iain Dale turned up around a quarter of an hour late. Apparently, he’d been driving around in circles, trying to find somewhere to put his car. Oxford is, to be fair, a complete nightmare to navigate. It’s a mess of one-way systems, most sat navs don’t have a clue which roads are accessible, and parking spaces are like gold dust.

After a round of hand-shaking and introductions, we sat down and tucked into our starter. The conversation quickly turned to the London mayoral elections, and more specifically, Boris Johnson’s campaign. Most people round the table seemed to feel that Boris was much more intelligent than the buffoon he’s often portrayed as, but that his policy platform wasn’t yet eyecatching enough, and that his campaign hadn’t really stepped into gear.

Iain identified one serious threat to Boris’s campaign: another terrorist attack. Ask most Londoners who they would most like to have in charge, if the capital were attacked, and it probably wouldn’t be Mr Johnson. Ken Livingstone was in charge last time, and held his nerve. Brian Paddick spent much of 7/7 on TV in his police uniform, staying calm and keeping the public informed. It’s a horrible thought, but if there were another attack on British soil, it would seriously sway the vote.

Over main course, the conversation drifted towards Nick Clegg, and his recent comments about being prepared, perhaps, to go into coalition with the Tories. It’s odd how many Lib Dems see it as an act of betrayal to even think about the idea. To my mind, the tribal anti-Tory reaction is extremely unhelpful. I think Clegg’s absolutely right – there’s no particular reason to favour one over the other, and it would be political suicide to indicate a preference.

Iain identified two possible dealbreakers that could sink a blue-orange coalition: Europe and electoral reform. I don’t think a political debate between a Tory and a Lib Dem would be complete without an argument about PR, and that’s exactly what we launched into. Iain thinks it’s undemocratic for a third party to become kingmakers, and to wield disproportionate power. I can’t see how it’s any fairer for a party to have almost unconstrained legislative power on the basis of 35% of the vote.

We nibbled down the last of the fruit salad and ice cream, and headed down to the Union’s beautiful library for a quick photoshoot, and for Iain to sign the Union’s guestbook. Then we headed across to the room where Iain would be speaking. There was a reasonable crowd; nicely mixed between Tories and other interested students. A round of applause as Iain and Ed walked in, and then we began.

Iain started off with his experiences of the selection procedure for parliamentary candidates. He spoke about the different sorts of interviews he’d been to, and the different styles of questioning he’d been subjected to. He also told us that he probably wouldn’t seek selection as a PPC again.

He took a look at the three party leaders in turn, starting with Gordon Brown and the week where it all went wrong. At the start of the Tory conference, Brown went to Iraq. Not only did it look like a stunt to take the spotlight off Cameron, but by taking only broadcast journalists with him, he managed to alienate the newspapers. Shortly after that, he managed to alienate everyone else as well, by cancelling the general election and by giving only one interview: to Andrew Marr.

Iain then turned to the Lib Dems. He claimed that ditching Ming was the right thing to do. In his view, there was a period, about two months before his resignation, where we had almost become an irrelevance. He was generally quite reasonable towards both Nick Clegg and Chris Huhne – he told us that either would have made a good leader for the party, and that we were lucky to have two heavyweights like that in our Shadow Cabinet frontbench team.

(We had a slight argument about the term “Shadow Cabinet” in the library, during the photo session before the talk. Iain apparently thinks that “Shadow Cabinet” is a formal term with a specific meaning, rather than simply a useful way for any opposition party to organise its frontbench. I don’t know where he gets these ideas from …)

Looking at David Cameron, Iain argued that there were supposed to be three stages to the Cameron strategy: an initial “detoxification” process to make the Tories palatable once more, then a long process of “constructing a narrative” and giving people an idea of what they stand for, followed by a much shorter process, in the run-up to the general election, of putting out concrete policy proposals. The stillborn election campaign of 2007 had badly interrupted that process, and the sense of narrative was still not quite there. That would be the main challenge for the Conservatives over the next year and a half.

The talk drew to a close, and Iain opened it up to the audience. Things kicked off with. a question about the relationship between bloggers and the mainstream media. Iain’s answer: they mainly do different things, rather than compete with each other. If he’d wanted to be a journalist by profession, there would have been nothing to stop him. The blog was more of a way for him to get his opinions of his chest. Having said that, bloggers are becoming far more influential and important than they were a couple of years ago; the US TV coverage of the primaries devoted 15-minute slots to blog roundups.

That led into a question about the US elections, to which Iain’s response was that none of the candidates was really a danger to the UK, and that Britain could work with any of the frontrunners. He was still backing McCain, but had been very impressed by Obama. He made one extremely telling comment: Obama is rather like David Cameron, in the sense that he’s got an awful long way without having many actual policies!

There were a number of other questions about the London mayoral election; I won’t go over all the material again. Iain’s opinions didn’t change very much between dinner and the talk!

The Q&A session finished off with a question about the BBC, its role as a public service broadcaster, and allegations of bias by the political parties. Iain argued that some parts of the BBC deserve to be thought of as public services – the list included BBC1 and 2, Radio 4 and 5 – but that other parts of the organisation have no business being in the public sector – Radio 1, as well as BBC3 and 4, came into this category. As far as bias is concerned, Iain asserted that there are most definitely conservative-minded people in prominent positions in the BBC, but that in general, journalists were more likely to be centre-left than centre-right. All parties claim that the BBC is biased against them, and the BBC usually use that as evidence that they’re getting it right; according to Iain, this is a very lazy response to a genuine problem. He singled out the Today Programme for particular criticism, and asked where there were never any credible eurosceptics on there.

That’s where the talk ended. Another loud round of applause, Iain slunk off to retrieve his Audi, and most of the rest of us slunk off to the pub to carry on the argument. A good night, I’d call it.

Nick Clegg: game on!

Finally, the Liberal Democrats have a new leader: Nick Clegg. During the leadership contest, I’ve refrained from openly supporting one candidate or other on my blog, but it’s worth saying that I voted for Clegg, and am very glad to see him win.

This is a crucial juncture for the Lib Dems, and comes at the end of a period where we’ve struggled to make progress. The trouble started at the last general election, where we achieved our best result in living memory, but still undershot our expectations – expectations which were understandably quite high, given the favourable political landscape. Returning 62 MPs was too impressive for Lib Dems to complain about, but given our hopes of making a big breakthrough, it left us feeling unfulfilled and uncertain. It’s that uncertainty which has led to the turbulence of the past two years, far more than Kennedy’s alcoholism or Ming Campbell’s failure to get a fair hearing from the press.

Clegg’s top priority, therefore, is to draw a line under what has been, in his own phrase, a very introspective time for the Lib Dems. There needs to be a clean break from the past few years. I don’t mean a break in terms of policy; we had a very clear one of those under Ming Campbell, who dropped Kennedy’s 50p tax rate in favour of his own policy of fiscal neutrality – without it making the blindest bit of difference to the perception of us as a tax-and-spend party. Good policy is very important, but on its own, it won’t take us beyond the level of a liberal think-tank.

Rather, the clean break needs to be made in terms of psychology. The media and the public won’t trawl through the fine detail of our policy papers, but they will respond to changes in tone and atmosphere, which is a far more subtle problem for the leader. The challenge is to paint a picture of a party that is confident, that has a vision, and that knows exactly where it’s going. If Clegg can generate that ambience, the troubles of the past couple of years will be quickly forgotten.

How to do it? Much as I hate the dumbing-down of political debates, he has to create a simple Lib Dem story, one which is easily told. It needs to be the story of an anti-establishment party, coming from the outside to take on a stifling and complacent political consensus. This is a story we’ve already started to tell; the “fighting the cosy consensus” soundbite has been cropping up for a while now. That soundbite needs to be taken up as our motto, and it needs to be the thread running through every announcement the party makes in the coming few months. We can’t hope to beat the other parties if we fight them on their own terms, as part of the political establishment. We don't have the resources, the core voter base, or – however much it pains us to admit it – the credibility with the media and the wider public. More to the point, within that establishment, the others have drawn up and designed the playing-field, and it’s slanted against us. It’s only by coming at them from outside that we can hope to make progress. For a realistic strategy, that theme needs to be incorporated into every single press release, statement or speech.

It’ll be a question of choosing the right phrases, the right angles, the right perspectives – and using them consistently, again and again, until they’re entirely associated with the Lib Dems. The rest will be down to the subtleties of body language, a few good interviews and speeches, and a fair bit of luck. From there, it should snowball. If we create the right atmosphere around the party, it will begin to affect the way other people see us, and utlimately, the extent to which they're prepared to trust us.

One thing is certain: we can’t afford to stagnate. Forget about Christmas: Clegg needs to get cracking. If he can put the troubles of his predecessor into a box, file it neatly away, and start a new, relentlessly positive era for the party, then we have a bright orange future. If he can’t, we’re doomed to another few years of misery. It’s game on.

Vince Cable – talent, luck, or media mischief?

Acting Liberal Democrat leader Vince Cable has been having an excellent time of late. Almost every political story to hit the press has carried a prominent Cable quote. His performances at PMQs have been widely praised, and commentators are starting to wonder if he shouldn’t have stood for the top job himself. The Lib Dems seem to have been enjoying a recovery in the polls, with ICM putting us on a healthy 19% last week. To top it all, activists have even set up a Facebook group in appreciation of the soft-spoken economist from Twickenham.

How do you think he does it? What makes him so good?

I posed the question to Nick Clegg last Thursday when he spoke at the Oxford Union (as if we weren’t all sick of the place by now!). In his capacity as home affairs spokesman, Clegg gave an excellent speech about Darfur, heavily criticising the way in which we deal with refugees from Sudan, pointing out the absurdities in our asylum system, and setting out a detailed programme for reforming the process. He took questions afterwards; although it was off-topic, I asked him how he would explain Vince Cable’s success, and how he would try to emulate it if he were elected leader.

Clegg suggested a couple of reasons. Firstly, he praised Cable for being a good communicator who could talk to people in language they could understand. (He then launched him into one of his stock leadership rants about “not sounding like Westminster policy wonks” and the suchlike.)

Secondly, he argued that Cable was in a very unusual situation. As acting leader, he was under far less pressure – the media knew he only had a short while in the job, and didn’t think it worth their effort digging up the dirt on him. And in a more sinister vein, he suggested that the media are deliberately giving him an easy ride, in order to give his eventual successor a hard act to follow. The papers would like nothing more, Clegg argued, than to write a story about either himself or Chris Huhne spectacularly failing to match the achievements of Vince Cable: “the best leader we never had”.

It may sound like appalling cynicism, but it has a ring of truth to it. I can well imagine the press giving Cable huge slices of juicy publicity, waiting for the announcement of the leadership result, and then launching a full-scale character assassination on the poor winner. They could then shout: “those idiotic Lib Dems, they’ve elected another hopeless one when they could have had Vince The Amazing”. It isn’t some anti-Lib Dem conspiracy theory, either: it’s the press’s fondness for making life difficult for politicians in general, and the inevitable Schadenfreude when they screw up.

Mischief-making can’t account for all of Vince’s success, though. He's been very fortunate with the political issues that have come up during his stewardship. With Northern Rock, he found himself on comfortable territory as a respected economic commentator. The scandal of the missing personal data has worked very well for the Lib Dems, who are associated most strongly with the campaign against ID cards. And the decision to boycott the Saudi visit was the sort of bold publicity stunt that only a third party could have pulled off successfully.

But like Nick Clegg, I feel that there is something more than media mischief or blind luck behind Cable’s success. He seems to have a genuine feel for the way in which the media like to present stories. An absolute case in point is the recent story on BBC News about the CDs lost by the Treasury, containing the personal details of 25 million people. The report was essentially about a Tory-led debate in the Commons, where Conserative Shadow Chancellor George Osborne questioned the Government’s story, and asked if the “whole truth” had been told. At the same debate, Vince Cable claimed that one person’s stolen identity could be sold on the black market for £60, valuing the entire missing database at around £1.5bn.

Despite it being an Opposition Day debate called by the Conservatives, the BBC ignored Osborne’s bleatings and went with Cable’s £1.5bn figure as their headline. Effectively, Vince stole a Tory story.

It’s sheer genius. Osborne calling Labour dishonest isn’t a particularly exciting story; he calls them dishonest every other week. But Cable’s figure of £1.5bn was concise, eye-catching and completely new. Vince knew exactly what he was doing, and he carried it off perfectly, stealing a headline from under Osborne’s nose. David Cameron must have been fuming.

Vince’s success so far is hard to analyse; some elements can be replicated by his successor, and some can’t. But it’s clear that talent, coupled with an astute understanding of the media mindset, has played a large role in the good publicity of the past few weeks and the revival in the opinion polls. I sincerely hope that Nick or Chris, whichever is elected, will take a serious look at Vince Cable’s tenure in Cowley Street, and draw the right lessons.

EXCLUSIVE: That Radio 4 interview in full

Hug A Hoodie presents a Lib Dem leadership interview even more exclusive than James Graham's excellent offering. This is a full transcript of the interview which LDYS exec member Mark Mills and I recorded for the BBC's The World This Weekend last Sunday. In the final cut, reporter Terry Stiastny only featured a few soundbites from each of us, but you can read the entire exchange here.

This is a "Hansardised" version - the content has been preserved faithfully, but I've edited where necessary for grammar, syntax and style.

Terry Stiastny: What’s the leadership campaign been like from your point of view? Has it been a good debate about the future of the party?

Jonny Wright: Not really, it’s been a bit low key. It’s a bit depressing in comparison with the Conservative leadership election a couple of years ago. To give them credit, although I didn’t agree with much of what was said on either side, they had two genuine points of view about the future of their party, and they had a good debate about it. I think that sort of debate needs to be had within the Liberal Democrats, but it isn’t really happening at the moment. I don’t think either candidate wants to rock the boat.

Mark Mills: I don’t really agree. It’s been low key, but that’s partly due to the fact that as Liberal Democrats, we get less attention paid to us than we perhaps deserve. But they are having a debate, and knocking around issues. It tends not to be a policy debate, because we don’t have the great divide that the Conservatives do; we broadly agree on a lot of things. It’s more about how we move the party forward, and how we make the party work for Britain.

TS: How are you likely to vote when you get your ballot papers next week, and how have your views changed over the campaign?

MM: I started off as a very enthusiastic Huhne supporter. I voted for him in 2006 when Ming Campbell became leader, and am a very big fan. However, I’m wavering a bit. I’m a supporter of the idea of school vouchers, which Chris has come out against. I think that’s an idea we shouldn’t rule out, but should give serious thought to.

TS: So it’s an issue of policy, rather than personality, which is making you doubt your support?

MM: Both candidates are very strong in terms of personality, and I would be happy with both of them. I don’t think we have to worry either way. It comes down to some very small differences in policy, because both can get the message across, and both can command the credibility needed to be a leader.

JW: It is about small differences in policy, but the problem is that it doesn’t give you much to go on. To me, it is more a question of who I could see at the helm of the party; who I could see as a better leader. I voted for Chris Huhne last time, but only as the best of a bad bunch, at what was a slightly uninspiring leadership election. This time, I’m almost certainly going to vote for Nick Clegg. I think he’s a good communicator, and an extremely good public speaker. He’s very good at set-pieces: conference rallies and conference speeches. That’s what sets the tone, and that’s what the media will pick up on. I can see him doing very well in behind-the-scenes discussions with other parties, on amendments and motions, and even if it came to a hung parliament. I could see him being good in those sorts of situations. I agree with what Mark says; either of them would be quite good. But for me, it’s Nick Clegg.

TS: So many people have said they prefer one or the other, for one or the other reason, but would be happy with either one. Is that a healthy debate? Shouldn’t there be more argument?

JW: It’s a good thing and it’s a bad thing. On the one hand, it means there isn’t a massive split in the party. With the Tory leadership election, you had two clear wings: the modernisers, who wanted to go forward and change the party, and the traditionalists. You don’t have that sort of big polar split in the Lib Dems. That’s a good thing, because the whole party is working together, but on another level, it doesn’t make for good internal debate, which we still need to have.

MM: I think we’re debating very vigorously at a certain level, if you read the blogs and other forums for party activists in local branches, but unfortunately, much of it hasn’t filtered through into the mainstream media. There are ordinary members who just pay their money every year, and I don’t know how much of the debate has got through to them.

TS: What about the age factor? Nick Clegg is 13 years younger than Chris Huhne. Does that make a difference in a constituency like this one [Oxford East], with a very big student population living in a marginal seat?

MM: I don’t think so. I’ve seen Chris talk to a student audience, and he’s very good, as is Nick – they’re both very comfortable with that sort of audience. I don’t think the difference is that significant. When most people visualise a politician nowadays, they visualise somebody aged between about 40 and 60, and the problem comes if you’re outside of that band. Within it, I don’t believe there’s much of a problem.

JW: I’m not sure age was that much of a factor even with Ming Campbell. It was more to do with his mannerisms. He was very old school, and sometimes even looked a bit doddery. That had more of an effect than his actual age. Vince Cable [who is almost Ming’s age] is doing very well as acting leader and has received a lot of goodwill and support across the board. I saw Paddy Ashdown being interviewed on the BBC in the run-up to Lib Dem Conference; he’s the same age as Ming Campbell, but looks about 10 years younger. It wasn’t about his age, it was about the impression he gave, and the way in which people responded to him.

TS: To what extent are students interested in politics in general, and in the Lib Dems in particular? If I went up to the people in the JCR watching Neighbours right now, and asked them what they thought about the Lib Dem leadership contest, would I get blank looks?

JW: I’m not sure you’d get blank looks; people probably would have an opinion. But there’s a split amongst students, as much as with any other group. You’ll find people who are very active within politics, for one party or another, and they’ll definitely have an opinion on the Lib Dems, one way or the other. The majority of people are interested in politics in general, and will see the Lib Dem leadership election going on in the background. They won’t have massively strong opinions, but will be following things on the news, in the background, with interest, but perhaps not especially keen interest. And as with the population in general, there’ll be a certain group of people who really don’t care.

TS: Do you think you’ll get a leader who’s going to be able to appeal to student voters, who will get people interested in politics, and interested in voting Lib Dem?

MM: Yes. I think we have a very strong set of policies that appeal to students, particularly on tuition fees, which is a standout issue. But also, students tend to care very strongly about issues like the environment, like Iraq, and like international development, and those are issues where we’re generally seen to be very strong. We can justifiably claim that we have something to offer.

TS: Are these the sort of issues people discuss in the bar?

MM: I can’t remember the last time I heard a political discussion in the bar. We spend far more time moaning about out tutors, or talking about Neighbours. The Lib Dem leadership election is a political issue, in the same way the Conservative or Labour ones were. Politics won’t get people excited until it engages with their ordinary lives. When it comes to deciding who to vote for, whether for a local MP who’ll vote to scrap tuition fees, or one who’ll vote to keep them, that will matter to students.

Chris Huhne on drugs: inconsistent, illiberal, and not very anti-establishment!

On Tuesday, I was lucky enough to be able to interview Lib Dem leadership candidate Chris Huhne, alongside fellow bloggers Millennium Dome, Alex Wilcock, Paul Walter, Mary Reid, and James Graham.

In general, I was impressed with what Chris had to say. He was very personable, very confident, and gave some very convincing answers to some very mean questions. There was, however, one answer in particular that I wasn't very pleased with.

I asked Chris the following question about drugs:

Jonny Wright: In your manifesto, you write: “On drugs, we must have the courage of our convictions,” but you don’t say in any kind of detail what those convictions are. I’d suggest to you that we can’t carry on fighting a losing battle against drugs, and that it’s time for a different approach, where mature adults calculate the risks and make their own personal decisions. I think that’s an approach that could be justified very convincingly using our liberal principles. How would you sketch out, in very practical terms, what a Chris Huhne drugs policy would look like?

Chris Huhne: Well let’s start with the liberal principles, because you’ve got me on a good theme there. We had tremendous rows in the parliamentary party on what we were going to do about the smoking ban. Some people talked about opposing the smoking ban as fundamentally illiberal because of the John Stewart Mill principle, which says that the only reasonable basis on which you can coerce anyone is if they are causing harm to others. I argued, on exactly the same principle, that we needed a smoking ban, precisely because smoking in public places does cause harm to others.

It comes down to a balance of judgement on drug issues. I think drugs need to be determined by scientific advice, not in terms of their categorisation, not in terms of what the Daily Mail tells us, or what the editor of the Daily Mail happens to think at a particular moment; so first and foremost – follow the scientific advice.

Secondly, I do very much agree with you here, if that’s the implication, that we need to take a much more medical attitude towards many people who are addicted to hard drugs. We need to make sure that they are able to find what they need without breaking into the local supermarket or robbing the local corner shop. Such an important part of crime is caused by the way we approach addiction. We need to try much harder to see it as a medical problem in which doctors have a much clearer role in ensuring that people are able to meet their addiction needs, and gradually build up a programme, over time, to come off drugs.

I don’t go down the libertarian line. I respect it as a position, but my experience is that when people take drugs, they harm others. Their own families, their own community – it’s not just a question of the individual, it’s also a question of the impact they have on others.

JW: You seem to be saying that we should take the advice of medical professionals in our strategy on drugs. But why should it be the legislators who take the medical advice onboard, rather than individual people in their own individual lives? How do you square that with decentralisation?

CH: I think it’s about taking onboard the impact on society of addiction and of drug use. If you say that people take this decision for themselves, without concern for anyone else, I would say that’s not the real world, because anybody who does become a serious drug user does have a real impact on their family, and on the health service, and on the local community.

JW: You could use exactly that same argument to ban alcohol, couldn’t you?

CH: You could. And clearly, in the past, in our party, the temperance movement, as you know, was very powerful, and did try to do exactly that, and justified itself on the same sort of principles that I’m talking about. For better or worse, alcohol has become a socially accepted part of our society, in a way that the use of other drugs has not. It seems to me that we need to re-think our approach to alcohol; we need to make sure that people are aware of the dangers of alcohol, particularly since alcohol is getting cheaper and cheaper relative to people’s income. There isn’t much that can be done about that, because the excise duty can be so easily avoided by buying in from countries on the continent. There are real issues about alcohol that we need to address, but because it is a socially-accepted substance, I think it’s in rather a different category to other drugs.

For a whole host of reasons, I'm not very happy with his answer. I don't wish to speculate about Chris's past life - it's not much of my business - but if he's been living on the same planet as the rest of us, he will certainly have met people who've smoked the occasional spliff, or popped the odd ecstasy tablet on the dancefloor, without causing any direct harm to their families and communities. I wouldn't in any way wish to suggest that those substances are safe: clearly they both carry significant risks. But just as adults can decide for themselves whether the pleasure of a pint of Tribute is worth the risk of liver damage a few decades down the line, I'm happy to let adult cannabis smokers make up their own minds about the risks of psychosis. I cannot for the life of me see why that very personal risk assessment should be made by legislators in Westminster, rather than by individuals. Liberals, and Chris Huhne in particular, love to talk about decentralised decision-making. There's no kind of decision-making more decentralised than that of an individual making their own mind up about the risks they're willing to take as part of their lifestyle.

The argument about the wider societal effects of drugs falls rather flat when you look at the legal status of alcohol. Alcohol, used irresponsibly, makes people misbehave, and even cause criminal damage - to the tune of £7.3bn a year. But we don't criminalise alcohol itself; we criminalise the people who use it irresponsibly and harm others, because the vast majority of us drink sensibly and hurt nobody. Damage to life and limb is against the law already. I don't see why we should take pre-emptive action against the many to compensate for the indiscretions of the few.

To make his argument on drugs, Chris has to sacrifice his principles. He accepts that alcohol is every bit as harmful as other recreational drugs, but because of its entrenched status, he's happy for people to drink. If alcohol had just been discovered yesterday, he'd have to ban it as well, by his own logic! For the sake of pragmatism, he's being deliberately and knowingly inconsistent.

I love Chris Huhne's rhetoric about being anti-establishment; about coming from the outside to take on the big two. That idea the absolute key to our future success, as I've said before. If we try to fight Labour and the Tories on their own terms, as part of a three-way political mainstream, we'll lose. They have the funding, the experience and the voter base to come out on top; we don't.

Disappointingly, when it comes to a controversial issue such as drugs policy, Chris is quite happy to defend the status quo, even though by his own admission, he has to be inconsistent and illiberal. For all the talk of bravery and radical spirit, when the going gets tough, he's quite happy to bury himself in the middle of the political establishment. If he wants my vote for leader, he'll have to do better than that.