It must be Clegg

I have just watched Simon Hughes, the Lib Dem President, tell his BBC interviewer that the downfall of Ming Campbell was the fault of “the press”. Even by Mr Hughes’s exacting standards, that is absolute nonsense. As Ming has faltered and cried out for support, the silence of his senior colleagues has been deafening. Truly, the Lib Dems are the “nasty party” now.

I stick by what I wrote in a Daily Telegraph column in January 2006. Nick Clegg is, as he was then, the only man for the job. Ming’s problem was never age – Mick Jagger and Michael Heseltine are proof enough that you can still bring down the house after 60. It was the Lib Dem leader’s countenance – a bearing he has always had – that made him unfit to be at the helm of a modern party: patrician, diffident, a little aloof. As Lib Dem voters looked at David Cameron’s green Tories with interest, and Labour switchers, no longer outraged by Iraq, drifted back to their party, Ming had no aggressive response to offer.