His party may be struggling to reach double digits in the polls, but Nick Clegg is entitled to feel smug as he heads to Glasgow for this year’s Lib Dem conference. This gathering, the penultimate one before the general election, has long been circled in Westminster diaries as the moment when a challenge to his leadership would emerge. But Clegg will arrive free from any threats to his position.
Not even the coalition’s defeat over Syria has destabilised Clegg. If, in May 2010, you had told a Liberal Democrat that their leader would back the coalition going to war in the Middle East without a UN mandate and then lose a Commons vote on it, he or she would have said that he’d be finished. But even though 24 of 57 Lib Dem MPs didn’t back Clegg and the government’s motion, there’s no talk of a leadership challenge.
Clegg can thank Chris Huhne, the man he beat for the leadership six years ago, for this.
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