The Liberal Democrat Leadership Slog

See, calling the contest between Clegg and Huhne a race is a little like calling the medical choices of a Jehovah's Witness sensible - ie, just plain wrong. Clegg and Huhne seem to agree on everything. And even as a relatively politically aware person in the UK, I struggle to tell the two apart even when I see their pictures. The simple rule I use is Huhne has greyer hair.

But both men should be worried. Deeply, deeply worried. The most recent Tory and Labour contests generated column inches, even though they largely consisted of like-minded people being nice to each other, and even though both had a clear front-runner. The fact that no-one seems to give a flying fuck about who becomes Lib Dem leader sends a pretty clear message to whichever man wins the leadership: no-one cares. And whilst someone like me banging on about how irrelevant the party is may be pretty much par for the course, the fact that the media and, ergo, the electorate, no longer care should be a massive alarm going off - a political equivalent of the Four Minute Warning.

Neither man is offering anything new, just a younger version of what went before. Neither man is proposing a way out of the Lib Dem decline, which means whoever takes the crown has no way of reversing the poll freefall that the coalition of geography teachers and bearded women who make up the Lib Dems have been experiencing.

At the risk of repeating myself I'll say it again - that party fucked itself when it ditched the ginger drunk. And no amount of radio silence from the candidates can change the fact that being made Lib Dem leader in 2007 makes becoming Tory leader in 1997 look like a dream political job.