Chris Huhne wants to be the leader of the Liberal Democrats. I offer as evidence of this assertion, not some cunning piece of Kremlinology, but the simple fact that he’s stood for the leadership twice before, and was beaten. Well, I say beaten. In fact, in 2007, he won. The official result put Nick Clegg 511 votes ahead of Huhne. But an unofficial assessment of over a thousand votes, which arrived late at Cowley Street because of the Christmas post, suggested that Huhne would have won if they’d been counted.
This burning sense of entitlement is what drives Huhne now. As the cabinet minister responsible for stemming global warming, he has a simple goal: to look good in the eyes of Liberal Democrat members. It’s easier to achieve this with a narrative of being betrayed by all around him, rather than by messy compromises and negotiations with colleagues. Briefings to the media have appeared for months, blaming the Treasury for a lack of progress on the Green Investment Bank, a key Liberal Democrat promise. Now that the bank has been delayed and watered down, Huhne is blaming everyone but himself. He’s let it be known he’s still opposed to nuclear energy, another government policy he’s supposed to be promoting. It’s not just anonymous briefings. He has proudly gone on the record to denounce a cabinet colleague as behaving like ‘Goebbels’. To compare the only Asian member of the cabinet, Sayeeda Warsi, to one of the architects of the Holocaust shows a special degree of vitriol. It all adds to the growing sense of government dysfunction.
Huhne has form. In the leadership election in 2007, he was forced to distance himself from a dossier entitled ‘Calamity Clegg’. Issued by the Huhne leadership campaign team, it contained a series of examples of Clegg’s ‘flip-flops’, from NHS policy to home affairs. When challenged, Huhne denied knowledge of the dossier, but went on to state ‘but I do think we’ve seen a series of flip-flops from Nick.’ Fancy that: Clegg accused of saying one thing and doing another.
Westminster is awash with rumours of a challenge to Clegg if his party flounders in the May elections and if the AV referendum results in a ‘no’ vote. Liberal Democrats are gearing up for a bloody battle, and for once the stakes are high enough to make it worthwhile. The contenders, such as Tim Farron for the Continuity Liberal Democrats, are dropping boulder-sized hints to hacks. Consider this in the Telegraph on 26 March: ‘Mr Huhne … has told colleagues privately that he would be interested in leading his party in the future.’ ‘Told colleagues privately’ is one of those phrases that suggests a good lunch at the Cinnamon Club. It’s Westminster code for writing manifestos and putting in phonelines. Huhne couldn’t be more on manoeuvres if he wore a tin helmet and carried a rifle.