The day I interview Chris Huhne, the Liberal Democrat leadership race has just got interesting. Only 24 hours previously, Huhne has been forced to issue an apology to his rival, Nick Clegg, after the BBC’s Politics Show flourished, live on air in front of the two men, a memo entitled “Calamity Clegg”, which his team had written. The Huhne document was a brazen exercise in black propaganda, outlining the alleged right-wing tendencies of the Sheffield MP on school vouchers, Continental-style health insurance and proportional representation.
By chance, the first person I bump into in Westminster on the way to the interview is the young pretender himself, so I ask him whether Huhne has just blown his chances of a place in a Clegg frontbench team. “Of course not,” he says. “Liberal Democrats aren’t like that.”
I ask Huhne the same question and his tone is conciliatory, but unrepentant. “I think we’re both far too big to worry about this sort of thing. In a leadership contest, it’s inevitable that you’re going to highlight the differences between the candidates on policy issues and I think that’s perfectly reasonable . . . The title was completely not appropriate at all. But the content of it is fine.”
Huhne argues that, thanks to his questions, Clegg has clarified his position on vouchers and health insurance and proportional representation (he’s against the first two and in favour of the last one). “There are clear quotations, on the record, which show that the position has changed on these issues and I’m very pleased that he’s now aligned with what I’ve been saying.”
This has been a peculiarly Lib Dem kind of spat: essentially an argument to establish how much the two candidates agree with each other. It’s a row all right, and it has even become quite spicy at times, but it’s hardly Blair-Brown territory, or even Cameron-Davis. Liberal Democrats just aren’t like that.
So what exactly are they like? The Liberal Democrats have a historic opportunity at the next general election to provide an alternative that people would actively vote for because they buy into their political programme, and not just as a protest against the two-party stalemate. The possibility of a hung parliament also works in their favour. But for the project to have real credibility they will have to stop defining themselves against the other parties. Simply being less centralising in public services, less draconian on civil liberties, less belligerent in foreign policy will not be enough. Huhne seems to agree. “One of the things that is important in our politics is to make sure that it isn’t predictable. If it just becomes a mishy-mushy sort of porridge, then nobody is going to take any interest in it at all.”
Terrible paradox
Asked to define his politics, Huhne quotes the 1960s Liberal Party slogan “People who think for themselves vote Liberal”. The trouble is that they didn’t. At the two elections that were held in the 1960s, the Liberal vote collapsed to around two million, and the parliamentary party was almost wiped out. It was only when it reinvented itself as the party of all things to all men in the 1990s that it really began to make electoral strides. It has consistently polled more than four million votes ever since. The terrible paradox of the Liberal Democrats is that the more mishy-mushy and porridge-like they are, the more people vote for them.
Asked to define a porridge-free politics of the centre, Huhne mentions his political hero, David Lloyd George. But he is not afraid to talk about ideas and invokes thinkers in the great liberal tradition such as John Stuart Mill, T Hobhouse and T H Green. “I firmly believe in thinking things through from liberal principles, from Mill’s ‘harm principle’, that the only basis for coercing someone against their will is to prevent harm to others.” It is refreshing to hear a politician speak in such unashamedly intellectual terms (Huhne has been a New Statesman reader throughout his adult life, after all), but it is yet to be seen whether such language will persuade his party that he is the man to carry forward its message in such anti-intellectual times.
Huhne agrees that the next election could be very close, but unusually he doesn’t accept that the Liberal Democrats would necessarily be kingmakers. Instead, he outlines an intriguing alternative scenario. “I don’t rule out the distinct likelihood that if there were to be no overall majority, there may be a grand coalition in which we would go into opposition,” he says. “I don’t think we would be in opposition for very long in the circumstances and I think we’d have some fun because it would be a disaster.” By this, we must assume he means the grand coalition rather than the Liberal Democrat opposition.
One area where Huhne differs clearly from Clegg is on Trident. Although Clegg voted against Trident renewal, he now believes that the de terrent must be retained until non-proliferation talks begin in 2010. Huhne does not accept this. “If my view of the world is right,” he says, “the threats are not the traditional nuclear powers, who are not always pleasant but are usually fairly rational, but people like Mr Ahmadinejad or President Kim Jong-il. The reality is that the idea that Kim Jong-il or Mr Ahmadinejad are going to give up their nuclear programmes because the British prime minister says we’re going to put Trident on the table is just cloud-cuckoo.”
On electoral reform, Huhne is less clear. He says he is prepared to look at any new system for Westminster elections, but urges the government to be as radical as it can. “What Gordon Brown has not woken up to yet is that it is absolutely essential that, if English progressives are not to be put into an almost permanent minority in England, we deal with the issue of the West Lothian question and English votes for English laws,” he claims. “That anomaly will be used by the Scottish National Party north of the border and the Tories south of the border to pick away at this open wound until it actually becomes a real problem.” Huhne’s solution? “The only way of tackling it is a comprehensive constitutional settlement which includes electoral reform for England and for Westminster.”
Huhne and Clegg are impressive politicians, the best candidates the centre party has managed to come up with since it became the Liberal Democrats. But they are both deeply conventional. They come from the same social elite that has produced the British political class for centuries. They even attended the same public school.
Both claim they want to transform the Liberal Democrats into a party that represents the full diversity of the British electorate. When I challenge Huhne on this he counters with his stock response that real change within the party would come only with reform of the electoral system. However, when I ask him whether he would have backed a leadership candidate who was black or a woman (there are no black or Asian Lib Dem MPs, and just a handful of women), his answer is more surprising. “Absolutely,” he says.
Chris Huhne: the CV
1954 Born 2 July. Educated at Westminster School, then the Sorbonne and Oxford
1977 Joins the Economist. Works in journalism for 19 years, also at the Guardian and the Independent on Sunday
1983 Candidate for SDP-Liberal Alliance in Reading East
1987 Runs in Oxford West and Abingdon, but stands down “due to work commitments”
1994 Founds IBCA, one of the City’s biggest teams of economists
1997 Lib Dem economic adviser during campaign
1999 Elected MEP for South-East England
2005 Enters Commons as MP for Eastleigh
2006 Stands for Lib Dem leadership; comes second
October 2007 Launches current leadership bid
Research by Alyssa McDonald
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