Ming the Merciless. © Steve Bell 2005
He's a grandee. He has gravitas. He was the Lib Dems' greatest asset during the general election. That much they all agree. But ask a Lib Dem to define Sir Menzies Campbell's core beliefs and there is a telling pause.
"Ideologically, I'm still not entirely sure where he stands," says one of the party's former employees, adding "he is more libertarian than I think people give him credit for."
Sir Menzies was warning of the dangers of identity cards during the late 1980s. He has held a shotgun certificate, and voted against the hunting ban on libertarian grounds.
He was also a keen supporter of home rule for Scotland, introducing a bill to create a Scottish Parliament - elected through proportional representation, of course - in 1991.
It got a second reading the following year and helped him keep the seat of North East Fife in the general election that year. Unlike his university friend Donald Dewar, however, he decided not to join the parliament he had helped to fight for.
"He's always been keen never to be pigeonholed," says Alex Cole-Hamilton, a Scottish Lib Dem who ran in Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath last year and who has worked closely with him.
He says Sir Menzies decided his talents were better suited to Westminster and "rightly recognised that the Scottish parliament was a new forum for new talent" - though in a Guardian interview three years ago he said he was disappointed that the Lib Dems and Labour had not sent more talent north of the border.
No one can accuse Sir Menzies of jumping on the anti-Iraq bandwagon. His interest in the Middle East dates back to before the Gulf war, which he supported, and he is no isolationist.
Indeed, there were rumours that he was decidedly less doveish than Charles Kennedy before the war. It is true that Sir Menzies praised the government's infamous dossier on WMD in September 2002, telling the Commons it was "a very British document, low-key and with no hyperbole, but sober and chilling", and that Saddam Hussein "most certainly has chemical and biological weapons and is working towards a nuclear capability."
But Sir Menzies, who became a QC in 1982, has always been careful to base his own arguments on the facts available to him.
He argued from the beginning that regime change was against the UN charter and an explicit UN resolution was necessary if Britain were to go to war in Iraq.
His supporters say his influence in the party extends far beyond Iraq. Cole-Hamilton describes him as the party's "guiding light" and dismisses the suggestion that he lacks experience in domestic issues. "We're very proud of him in North East Fife. He never shirks from the bread and butter issues of being a constituency MP."
Nonetheless, with the exception of brief stints handling home affairs and sport, in the late 1980s, Sir Menzies has focused exclusively on foreign affairs and defence for the past 13 years.
He has never had to tackle the so-called "balance issues" on which general elections are fought and lost: the economy, crime, education, the NHS. Nor does he seem particularly keen on environmental issues - an area in which the Tories are trying hard to outflank the Lib Dems.
A year or two ago, when Iraq seemed to sideline domestic politics, that might not have mattered. Now it looks like a weakness. If he does take over, Sir Menzies will rely heavily on the younger talents in his party to formulate the Lib Dems' domestic policies.
"I can't see him holding anyone down," says one former party insider. "Ming's too shrewd an operator. He's not going to be around for 10 years."
That's the other big worry, of course. He was diagnosed with non-Hodgkins lymphoma in 2002 and, although he is now in remission, he will be 65 in May.
Cole-Hamilton calls him a "man of tremendous energy and never shy of a fight", but Ariel Sharon's illness and the death of both a Labour peer and a Labour MP in the past few days have reminded the Lib Dems that even a former Olympic sprinter like Ming is not immortal.
If some of Sir Menzies' beliefs are opaque, few Lib Dems seem to mind. They cite his popularity with older women voters and the stately figure he would cut against the 39-year-old David Cameron.
The current obsession with youth is a "British thing", one says. Many in the party are tired of being caricatured as sandal-wearing intellectual lightweights: Sir Menzies is neither of those things.
They hold out the unlikely hope that he might just be made foreign secretary in a hung parliament.
The would-be leader certainly knows how to stay in the running - he held on to the UK 100-metre record for seven years - but he will have a lot of catching up to do if his party finally turn to him.
