All bets are definitely off after last night's debate between the four Lib Dem leadership contenders. Neither Sir Menzies Campbell nor Simon Hughes shone, and the other two candidates began the job of impressing themselves on the party membership in reasonable style.
Sky News did its best to deflate the tension with an downbeat lead-in featuring a "typical Lib Dem" ambling gloomily around London before gazing hopefully at the windows of the party's Cowley Street HQ. It took some time for the candidates to engage each other, but when they did, a few sparks flew.
Sir Menzies conceded early on that he would have to give up his ancient Jaguar to affirm his green credentials - a tactical move, given the younger candidates' determination to make the Lib Dems the first choice of environmentally conscious voters. Tax and smoking provoked some wrangling, but all were agreed to reject nuclear energy. "I don't think we should reconsider our opposition to nuclear power," said Chris Huhne; Hughes agreed. Mark Oaten wanted farmers to grow biofuels.
Campbell indicated that he was keen to finesse the party's tax policy. "50p is mechanism, not a dogma," he said. "It's not the Ark of the Covenant." Oaten, on the other hand, wanted to keep the 50p rate, and Hughes unsurprisingly said he was "absolutely in favour of a higher rate for higher earners". Huhne wanted to raise more funds by taxing fuel more heavily (even, he said pointedly, domestic gas).
But it was on the issue of a smoking ban that the candidates' differences, and their various struggles to define modern liberalism, came to the fore. Huhne invoked John Stuart Mill in his defence of a ban: "This is a case of avoiding damage to other people. This is not a classical liberal issue." Oaten disagreed: "I can't support an outright ban, I'm a liberal." He accused Sir Menzies of a "pick-and-mix" approach to liberalism.
The 64-year-old occasionally struggled to make his voice heard, waving a finger rather haplessly in an effort to get attention and looking slightly ill at ease. "We must be ambitious, we must be consistent, we must be professional," he said flatly. The voters in the Lib Dem constituency of Carshalton and Wallington were not particularly impressed by the party's grandee. Most said they had yet to make up their minds, but there were hints that Mark Oaten's relative youth and modernity might win over the party.
