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Greg Hurst

Editor of the Guide

The Liberal Democrats scarcely looked like a party on the brink of power for much of the 2005-10 Parliament. Two leaders resigned after losing support and authority, twice pitching members into leadership elections that were bitterly fought and bruising, rather than cathartic, and left some participants damaged. Yet despite periods of intense turbulence, the party underwent a profound transition as the leadership passed to a new generation with a different outlook from the social liberalism that had been its dominant philosophy for decades. An influx of 20 new MPs, a third of the parliamentary party, many of whom were able, experienced and, above all, ambitious, was another important dynamic.

The general election of 2005 was a double-edged sword for the Lib Dems. A net gain of 11 seats took them to 62 MPs, the highest for a third party since 1922, with some huge swings from Labour. The Conservatives, who gained five seats but lost three to the Lib Dems, unnerved those MPs who survived with precarious majorities with a ferocious new style of locally targeted campaigning. Such were the expectations that many Lib Dems hoped for a bigger breakthrough and saw the election as an opportunity missed.

Charles Kennedy, exhausted two days after the birth of his son, had torpedoed his own manifesto launch during the campaign by floundering over the details of a flagship policy for a local income tax. He found himself under pressure from the outset of the new term. Disappointment with the election result, compounded by tensions between social and economic liberals and frustration among new MPs with the party’s organisation in the Commons were compounded when Mr Kennedy drifted into one of his periodic bouts of introspection just as the party was crying out for leadership and strategic direction.

Although popular with many voters, Mr Kennedy was a source of increasing frustration with colleagues owing to an innate caution, chaotic organisation and reliance on a tight-knit inner circle of long-time friends. Although many suspected it, relatively few knew that he was an alcoholic who, when confronted by leading figures in the party in 2004, had agreed to undergo treatment but was subject to intermittent relapses. After months of tension, fresh drinking episodes in the autumn of 2005 proved to be the final straw for several of the younger generation of senior Lib Dem MPs, who began discussing plans for a multi-signature letter of no confidence in their leader.

A series of semi-public confrontations ensued during which Mr Kennedy, having previously appeared oddly detached, proved himself extraordinarily tenacious in seeking to cling on. Even when his alcoholism was disclosed, by a television journalist, he attempted a final throw of the dice by calling a leadership ballot of members in which he declared that he would be a candidate. His critics countered with a collective threat of resignation: 25 MPs declared that they would resign from their front-bench positions unless he fell on his sword. In a dignified statement the following day, Mr Kennedy duly stepped down.

The damage to the party did not stop there. Mark Oaten, a senior MP and, briefly, potential candidate for leader, was disgraced over liaisons with a male prostitute. Another candidate, Simon Hughes, Mr Kennedy’s chief rival for much of his leadership, was forced to admit to past sexual relationships with men, despite telling journalists that he was not gay.

It was the nadir: in January 2006, a YouGov poll put Lib Dem support as low as 13 per cent. The party looked at though it might tear itself apart. The unlikely and unexpected victory in the Dunfermline & West Fife by-election the following month, for which Mr Kennedy himself returned to the spotlight to campaign, helped to steady the ship.

The front-runner to replace him was Sir Menzies Campbell, the deputy leader, who made his name articulating the party’s opposition to the Iraq war. Any hopes of a coronation were dashed when Chris Huhne, a former MEP and one of the sharpest of the party’s new MPs, entered the race despite previously pledging to support Sir Menzies. Mr Huhne’s audacity enraged senior colleagues who had risked their reputations to topple Mr Kennedy but quickly won the admiration of many party activists, who mistrust anything that smacks of a stitch-up.

Sir Menzies won the election but Mr Huhne finished a strong second, after a vigorous campaign. Despite claims from supporters that Sir Menzies would bring a statesman’s authority to the role, his opening appearances in the Commons proved to be disastrous, as he struggled to be heard in the bear pit of Prime Minister’s Questions. In one early outing, as acting leader, he asked why one in five schools were without a permanent head. As his own party was itself without a leader, this provoked uproarious hilarity. Rapidly he was portrayed as too old, at 64, and out of touch. A determined man, he received coaching and his Commons performances improved but too late to rescue his reputation as an assured parliamentarian. Recriminations over his role in the traumatic resignation of Mr Kennedy also poisoned the well of the party’s body politic.

This was the Lib Dems’ awkward predicament as David Cameron, in his first year as Conservative leader, set about a re-branding exercise seeking to bite chunks out of their support. In a speech in Hereford, a precarious Lib-Con marginal constituency, Mr Cameron declared himself a “liberal Conservative” and appealed to Liberal Democrats to back him. His skilful championing of green issues threatened to wrest the mantle of environmental campaigning from the Lib Dems’ complacent grasp: plans by Mr Cameron for a wind turbine on the roof of his house and travelling by husky sled to view melting glaciers in Norway were vivid pieces of political positioning, although his environmentalism proved short-lived.

Another Conservative overture, seeking to field the former BBC Director-General Greg Dyke as a joint Tory-Lib Dem candidate for London Mayor, was more deftly rejected by Sir Menzies. The Lib Dems’ eventual candidate, Brian Paddick, proved to have questionable judgment and trailed in third place.

The following year, when Gordon Brown succeeded Tony Blair at No 10, the Lib Dems’ defences were tested again. Mr Brown wanted to appoint two Lib Dems to his Cabinet: Lord Ashdown of Norton-sub-Hamdon and another peer who he hoped would defect to Labour, as he tried to construct a broad-based “government of all the talents”. His plan leaked and was scuppered; oddly, Mr Brown assumed that Lib Dems would serve in a Labour administration, not a coalition with agreed policy concessions. The new Prime Minister settled on advisory posts for several Lib Dems: Lady Neu-berger (on volunteering), Lord Lester of Herne Hill (on constitutional reform) and Baroness Williams of Crosby (on nuclear proliferation). Matthew Taylor, a former front-bencher, conducted an inquiry on rural housing.

The impact was deeply unsettling for the Lib Dems. It smacked of a crude attempt to divide the party’s senior ranks, signalling to its left-of-centre supporters to return to Labour’s embrace. Like many of Mr Brown’s initiatives, the strategy soon unravelled but it again called into question the judgment of Sir Menzies and his closest adviser, Lord Kirkwood of Kirkhope, both of whom had presented his long-time friendship with Mr Brown as an asset.

Another unnerving factor for the Lib Dems was the unfolding narrative of the prosecution of their biggest donor, Michael Brown, whose donations of £2.4 million doubled their 2005 election budget. He was later convicted of money-laundering and theft and some wealthy investors who were his clients demanded that money be returned to them by the Lib Dems, who insisted that they had taken, and spent, the money in good faith. The episode severely damaged the Lib Dems’ attempts to portray themselves as political reformers.

Under Sir Menzies’ leadership, his party’s poll ratings drifted slowly downwards, from 20 per cent in March 2006 to 15 per cent in the summer of 2007 and even 12 per cent that autumn, according to Populus, although they rose before and afterwards. When Mr Brown flirted with but abandoned a snap autumn election, Sir Menzies saw his chance and announced his resignation, knowing that his party had breathing space to elect his successor. His 18-month tenure, while difficult, saw important advances. Most notably he promoted to key spokesmanships and party positions a new generation eager to inject credibility on policy and greater professionalism into its organisation at Westminster: MPs such as David Laws, Ed Davey, Norman Lamb, Vince Cable and Nick Clegg. The forthcoming leadership election gave them a chance to complete their grip on the party’s levers of power.

There was little doubt that this new generation would choose as its champion Nick Clegg, a former MEP who entered the Commons in 2005, took an erudite interest in policy, was articulate and effective on television but had a restless disrespect for convention and a keen appetite for reform. As Sir Menzies had, Mr Clegg began in the uncomfortable position of front-runner and, like him, faced a formidable challenge from Mr Huhne. Mr Clegg’s campaign was cautious, holding back from his instinct to offer a bold, modernising agenda for fear of jeopardising his lead; Mr Huhne’s was slightly populist and overtly aggressive, attacking his rival for “flip-flopping”. His supporters at one point issued a rebuttal document entitled Calamity Clegg. The result was uncomfortably close, with Mr Clegg winning by about 500 votes.

Another by-product of the campaign was that the Lib Dems emerged with a new celebrity. Vince Cable, who was elected the party’s deputy leader in place of Sir Menzies, found himself standing in at Prime Minister’s Questions during the interregnum that followed his resignation. Dr Cable, who harboured leadership ambitions of his own before reluctantly ruling himself out because of his age, seized the moment.

His first attempt, when he cracked a joke, fell slightly flat: humour in the charged atmosphere on the floor of the House requires split-second timing and the ability to catch a mood. Undeterred, he tried again the following week. Mr Brown, having cancelled the autumn election, was embroiled in a scandal of hidden donations to Labour and the loss of child benefit records for 25 million families. “The House has noticed,” Dr Cable began, “the Prime Minister’s remarkable transformation in the last few weeks from Stalin to Mr Bean, creating chaos out of order, rather than order out of chaos.” The Commons collapsed into laughter. Vince Cable became a household name almost overnight.

Mr Clegg, like all new Lib Dem leaders, struggled to make an impact with the electorate, often finding himself in the shadow of his energetic deputy leader, whose profile rose throughout the financial crisis that engulfed Britain’s banks from autumn 2008. To frame the party’s response to the economic crisis Mr Clegg convened a small group of experts and advisers; Vince Cable was a prominent member but Mr Clegg insisted on chairing it himself, asserting his authority rather than deferring to his more experienced deputy.

He took care to stay close to Mr Huhne, seeking his counsel often and holding him close rather than allowing any rift to open between them; Mr Huhne repaid him with loyalty. Meanwhile, Mr Clegg’s allies were given key roles: David Laws played an increasingly key role in policy development, Ed Davey took charge of communications and Danny Alexander, who impressed Mr Clegg while working on his leadership campaign, became his chief of staff. Among backroom allies, he relied most on John Sharkey, a former advertising executive, for language in interviews and speeches; Polly MacKenzie to write his speeches; Jonny Oates for strategic media advice; Leana Pietsch on how issues would play in the press; and Alison Suttie to organise his office. This latter role was key: Mr Clegg, with three young children and impatient with the after-hours culture of the Commons, was ruthless in prioritising his diary and insisted on having time to take his boys to school or put them to bed, even if it meant returning to the Commons later. Much key party business was decided in conference telephone calls, with several advisers asked to ring a number with a PIN code at a given time for a focused discussion with the leader. It meant that the demands of managing a difficult and disparate party were contained and he could concentrate his energies elsewhere.

Mr Clegg’s approach was to develop an irreverent, anti-Establishment edge to the Lib Dems, both as a strategy for being noticed and to differentiate himself from Labour and the Conservatives: when standing for leader he pledged to go to prison rather than comply with a national identity card register. This meant embracing some future hostages to fortune: opposing the replacement of the Trident nuclear deterrent, on which Mr Huhne had campaigned, and an “earned amnesty” for illegal immigrants, developed by Mr Clegg himself while home affairs spokesman. The latter, in particular, cost the Lib Dems many votes. Other key policy developments included dropping a symbolic commitment to a new 50p top rate of income tax, agreed under Sir Menzies’ leadership and later implemented by Labour. Instead emphasis shifted towards taxing wealth, such as pensions contributions and capital gains, and exempting people earning beneath £10,000 a year from paying tax altogether, a policy revived from the 1997 manifesto. Mr Clegg made a further priority of improving education provision for children from poorer families.

An early test of his mettle was over Europe: Mr Clegg ordered his MPs to abstain on a Commons vote on whether the Lisbon treaty should be subject to a referendum, for which the Conservatives were campaigning. Several Lib Dems had pledged to constituents that they would back a referendum and could not comply, notably David Heath, Tim Farron and Alistair Carmichael in his Shadow Cabinet. Mr Clegg would not submit to a fudge by allowing them a free vote and accepted their resignations when they were among 15 Lib Dems to vote in favour.

If this episode was oblique, the issue that next introduced Mr Clegg to the voters was anything but. The Lib Dems inflicted on Gordon Brown his first significant Commons defeat, using one of their opposition days to table a motion to allow ex-Gurkha soldiers the right to live in Britain. The issue was simple for voters to understand and had the added appeal that the Gurkhas were backed by the television actress Joanna Lumley. Mr Cameron raced outside the Commons to join Mr Clegg celebrating with Ms Lumley for the television cameras. Mr Clegg again made waves by demanding the resignation of the Speaker, Michael Martin, over his inept handling of the MPs’ expenses scandal, the first party leader in modern political history to do so. He appeared about to find his voice just at a moment when Conservative support was slipping while Mr Brown remained a deeply divisive Prime Minister. Yet his pre-election conference missed this opportunity, with several errors. Mr Clegg unwisely urged “savage” cuts in public spending, and appeared to ditch a commitment to scrap university tuition fees but was forced to back-track after a party backlash. Vince Cable provoked anger from MPs by unveiling, like a magician pulling a rabbit from a hat, a “mansion tax” on houses worth more than £1 million, later modified to £2 million.

Another of Sir Menzies’ legacies was to have ordered preparations for an early election from 2007, meaning that target seat planning, candidate selection, fundraising and campaign staff recruitment were well advanced. The process was headed by Lord Rennard, the party’s chief executive and architect of a string of by-election coups, but under Mr Clegg’s leadership pressure developed for a new approach. Lord Rennard stood down in May 2009, coinciding with controversy over his Lords expenses claims, for which he was later cleared, meaning that none of Mr Clegg’s core team had experience of running a general election.

Given Dr Cable’s higher profile, they agreed long beforehand to make the campaign a double act. To avoid a repeat of the fraught “two Davids” SDP-Liberal Alliance duopoly of 1987, when reporters took delight in pouncing on differences between David Owen and David Steel, they campaigned together. The Clegg-Cable partnership worked well enough but was rapidly overtaken by events, as the television debates finally made Nick Clegg a national figure in his own right. Greg Hurst is the author of Charles Kennedy: A Tragic Flaw (2006)