The Daily Echo 20 December 2007

Written by Sandra Gidley MP on Thu 20th Dec 2007

The highlight of this week, from a Liberal Democrat perspective, is the election of our new leader. From the early days of the campaign the media had predicted an easy win for Nick Clegg. I always felt it would be a close run thing as many of the members had formed a high opinion of Chris Huhne during the previous election campaign and Chris Huhne in campaigning mode is not someone to be underestimated. Ultimately 511 votes separated the two men and I hope that they will work closely together over the forthcoming years as they are quite a combination.

Nick, as new leader, will be offered advice from all and sundry but the one person he ignores at his peril is Vince Cable. Vince is our Deputy Leader and has been acting leader since Ming's resignation. During that time he has earned the respect of many - particularly for his performance at Prime Minister's Question Time and many have questioned why he did not put himself forward as a leadership candidate.

Vince is hugely talented but it is interesting that people have judged his leadership purely on his performance at Question Time. Clearly there are other aspects to being a leader and this caused me to reflect on the nature and styles of leadership.

It is often the case that organisations need different types of leader at different times. Ming was an interesting example as he commanded a huge amount of respect within the party, was organisationally very sound and did a great deal of work to make sure that we had a solid foundation for the future. Unfortunately he received a lot of criticism for his performance at Prime Minister's Questions and for media appearances generally. I was fairly relaxed about that as our leaders have never fared particularly well at PMQ and William Hague was brilliant in this arena but it didn't really do him much good in the long run.

Ming had a wonderful Elder Statesman quality but this could, on occasion, make him cautious. As a third party we have to be bold otherwise we will be squeezed out of the picture.

So, the one thing I want from Nick Clegg, our new leader, is for him to be bold. I was heartened by his acceptance speech and it seems that he is thinking along the same lines. He is extremely personable and engaging and clearly passionate about his liberalism. With a strong team behind him I am extremely optimistic for the future.

Published with kind permission of The Daily Echo