The Talents of Chris Huhne

Man leaves wife for mistress. Happens every day to ordinary people all over the country. It's regrettable, but all part of life's mysterious pattern. And yet if it involves a politician, it makes the front pages of the Sunday newspapers. Even now.

Yes, I feel sorry for Mrs Huhne, but her husband is not a politician who has eulogised the institution of marriage or made speeches about it. The only hypocrisy he is guilty of relates to deceiving his wife.

Suggestions that he ought to lose his job are misplaced. The breakup of his marriage does not mean he is any less capable a Cabinet Minister than he was when he was appointed five weeks ago.

While I was driving to Salisbury last evening I got a call from the Mail on Sunday asking if I could write a quick commentary column on this. As I was driving, and had to get to the theatre for my show with La Widdecombe, I declined. I spent the rest of the journey musing over what I would have written. Suffice to say that it would have been rather friendlier to Chris Huhne than the column which appears in today's Mail on Sunday by James Forsyth!

James says that the LibDem members of the Cabinet were not properly vetted. This implies that he thinks someone having an affair should never have been appointed in the first place. Rubbish. The rest of the piece is one attack after another on Huhne. He's called "a busted flush", "a man with a high opinion of himself" and James thinks his "star is on the wane".

I think he exaggerates. Huhne is far from a busted flush and if anything happened to Nick Clegg he would still be a good bet to succeed him. I'm sure he does have a high opinion of himself - so do most politicians. I'm not sure I want people in politics who have low opinions of themselves! I had a chat with him earlier in the week and he was clearly revelling in the job and also enjoying working with Conservatives. Slightly to his surprise, he had found it very easy to work with people from another party. He pointed out that they were all on the same learning curve.

There are many LibDems I don't respect. Chris Huhne is not one of them. He is personable, highly intelligent and a man of clear views. I may not agree with many of them, but he is certainly one of the most talented LibDems in the Commons.

His affair doesn't change that.

The Failures of Ed Davey

Ed Davey, the LibDem Foreign Affairs Spokesman has written a wonderfully incoherent article for LibDem Voice on the Georgian crisis. I thought Nick Clegg had ordered his troops to turn their fire on Labour rather than the Tories, but Davey appears not to be listening to his leader. He lays into Cameron for his "macho language" and then a few lines later talks about Russia being a "brutal bully". I think Cameron just used to the word "brutal". And then to cap it all, despite the Russians being "brutal bullies" he then says they have been "deliberately excluded and antagonised". Breathtaking.

He then writes...

Russia might be more impressed by macho talk from Dick Cheney and the Conservative Leader if it was accompanied by pledges to return defence expenditure to Cold War levels and introduce conscription. Yet the cold logic that led Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher also to propose major rearmament seems to have passed the neo-Conservatives by.

What on earth does that mean? That he supports a massive increase in defence expenditure? he then goes on to reaffirm the LibDems' commitment to abandoning the British nuclear deterrent - just at the time that the Russians are threatening a NATO ally (Poland) with being nuked.

It was Ed Davey, of course, who was behind the LibDems' policy of constructive abstention on the Lisbon Treaty, and who conjured up their embarrassing walkout from the House of Commons when the Speaker refused to call his abstention on an In/Out referendum.

Davey was once a LibDem rising star. In his current job he is totally out of his depth. Ming Campbell must be shaking his head in disbelief.

Of course, the real story is that Nick Clegg never wanted Davey in the job in the first place. He offered Chris Huhne the job of Foreign Affairs spokesman, but Huhne turned it down and insisted on Home Affairs. And the rest, as they say, is history. A bit like the LibDems.

The Chris Huhne Air Raid Shelter

If you look at the Hansard from yesterday's debate you will see that Chris Huhne decided to ignore my advice yesterday! Up and down he bobbed, intervening on various Labour and Tory MPs like his leadership ambitions life depended on it. The subliminal messages being given were revealing...

* I'm being loyal
* I've got cojones
* Nick Clegg isn't here
* I am here
* Ed Davey is useless
* I'm not

It put me very much in mind of another debate in the House of Commons in May 1940 when Leo Amery Lloyd George intervened on another potential party leader, one Winston Spencer Churchill who was rampantly defending the actions of Neville Chamberlain's government. Amory begged Churchill not to turn himself into an air raid shelter for Chamberlain. Perhaps someone should have done the same for Chris Huhne yesterday.

Top Ten Things for Chris Huhne to Avoid Today

1. Saying 'I told you so'
2. Saying anything
3. Sitting next to Clegg at PMQs
4. Installing phone lines
5. Being seen with Lembit Opik
6. Shaking his head
7. Writing a supportive article for LibDem News
8. Blogging
9. Smiling
10. Voting

Please do feel free to add your own suggestions in the comments...

Chris Huhne - The Mary Whitehouse of the Climate Change Debate

Janet Daley writes an excellent ARTICLE in today's Telegraph on how the green lobby must not be allowed to stifle the debate on climate change. One parapgraph stood out in particular...

Some of the dissident voices on climate change were rounded up for last week's polemical Channel 4 documentary made by Martin Durkin, The Great Global Warming Swindle (repeated tonight on the digital channel More4). Whether or not you were persuaded by their articulate doubts, you could not help being struck by the McCarthyite persecution (up to and including death threats) which their non-conformist opinions had attracted. Scientists with impeccable
credentials, emeritus professors and acknowledged experts in the field being hounded and professionally discredited for their reservations about an established orthodoxy: not a pretty sight. Hundreds of years after Galileo, we are apparently still prepared to suppress inconvenient intellectual opposition once political interests have become entrenched. Among those who attempted to prevent the film being shown at all was the Liberal Democrat spokesman on the environment, Chris Huhne, who, without having seen the programme, wrote to Channel 4 executives advising them in the gravest terms to reconsider their decision to broadcast it.

This is typical of the way some people are trying to stifle the debate. What on earth did Chris Huhne - who is normally on the saner wing of the LibDems - think he was playing at? He seems to have become the Mary Whitehouse of the Climate Change debate, trying to dictate what the 'little people' may or may not be allowed to watch. I hope to watch the Channel 4 programme in the next couple of days. From what I have heard of it, it was not an emotional programme and tried to look at the facts in a sanguine manner. For Chris Huhne to try to ban this programme from being shown says a lot. It says he's not a Liberal, for starters.

UPDATE. Contrast Chris Huhne’s attempt to get Channel 4 to censor the debate on climate change (whatever you think of the merits of the arguments or not), with Evan Harris – LibDem MP for Oxford – who on the Liberal Democrats national website on 9 March asserted that MigrationWatch must be allowed free expression on their views on immigration…

As Harris states, “I urge the petitioners to debate with or to ignore our opponents, not to try to ban them.”

UPDATE 2: Chris Huhne has just emailed me. He's sent this letter to the Telegraph...

Sir,
Janet Daley is simply wrong to state that I wrote to Channel 4 “advising them in the gravest terms to reconsider their decision to broadcast” Martin Durkin’s The Great Global Warming Swindle (Monday March 12th 2007). I wrote asking for Channel 4’s comments on the fact – not in dispute – that the last time Mr Durkin ventured onto this territory he suffered serious complaints for sloppy journalism – upheld by the Independent Television Commission - and had to apologise. I note that one of his interviewees on this latest programme has already complained about his treatment.
The notion of Ms Daley that Mr Durkin is some latter-day Galileo is absurd: the academic debate on climate change is entirely free, and the editor of Science has said that it is rare to find a debate on which the consensus is so firm. In 923 peer-reviewed scholarly journal articles on climate change in the last ten years, not a single one questioned the global consensus on the man-made causes of climate change though there was plenty of debate about the scale. There is not a single computer model of the global climate anywhere in the world that ignores man-made greenhouse gases in explaining climate change.
Mr Durkin is not seeking to enter into a scholarly debate, but to score points using the mass media to disguise the poverty of support for his argument. Propaganda is not scholarship, as Ms Daley inadvertently reminds us.
Yours sincerely,

Chris Huhne MP (Liberal Democrat shadow environment secretary)

Clegg: Ming's the Best Leader We've Got

Remember when RAB Butler answered a question from a journalist on whether Anthony Eden was "the best prime minister we've got" by answering "yes"? Well today we have a 2007 version. This is what Nick Clegg said in an extensive INTERVIEW in today's Times...

"People Shouldn't write Ming off."

No indeed, Nick, but carelss talk costs political lives... The Times interview is a classic case of positioning. No politician does an interview with someone like Giles Hattersley without knowing exactly what his game is. Clegg knew full well that it would be largely about his own ambitions, with a bit of Home Affairs stuff for appearances sake. And it comes at a time when a LibDem whispering campaign against Sir Ming is already in full swing - well, in partial swing. Here's a bit more from the interview...

But never mind all that, is a leadership race on the cards? Clegg says not. “People shouldn’t write Ming off,” he says carefully. “I think the contrast between Cameron and him will work.” Is Clegg at least sensing the buzz about him? “It is both flattering and problematic.” But you’ll run when Campbell steps down after the general election? “Look, if and when I think I have a serious contribution to make then I’d be daft not to give it serious consideration.” Increasingly with Clegg it seems much less “if” than “when”. As the compassionate Conservatives, with their touchy-feely work/ life balance agenda, encroach further on Liberal ground Clegg is seen as one of the few who can play them at their own game. There is talk that his leanings are so blue, in fact, that the Cons once tried to poach him for their own shadow cabinet.

Now, when I see a similar interview with Chris Huhne in another newspaper I'll know that the whispering campaign really is in 'full swing'. I'm sure I won't have long to wait.