Nick Clegg is the new Leader
Written by Ryan Cullen on 18th December 2007 – 2:39 pmThe results are in:
Nick Clegg - 20,988 (50.6%)
Chris Huhne - 20,477 (49.4%)
Turnout - 41,465
Credits Alex Folkes/Fishnik.com
Standby for further updates, including the winner of our Leadership Election Prediction Competition
EDIT 00:34am: The fullest information on results is available here. From this, we now know that turnout was 64.4% and there were 222 spoiled ballot papers. The winner of our election prediction competition… will still need to wait for Ryan’s spreadsheet to be completed. - Alex Foster
Posted in Leadership Election
18th December 2007 at 2:46 pm
Well done Nick! Here’s to a bright and liberal future!!
Excellent speech from Chris as well. I hope he gets his rightful place at the heart of Nick’s Shadow Cabinet.
18th December 2007 at 2:49 pm
Relief. Joy. Relief. Joy…
18th December 2007 at 2:50 pm
Well done Nick. Exciting times ahead I hope!
18th December 2007 at 2:52 pm
Well I am not pleased!
Well done to him, and congartulations; but I am very worried about the direction of the Party under his leadership.
18th December 2007 at 2:54 pm
511 votes difference. Seems the whole party was undecided. As one of the ‘couldn’t decide’ group, well done Nick, and now get to work at building on what Vince has done for you.
18th December 2007 at 2:57 pm
Many congratulations to Nick - his speech was excellent.
CRIKEY - that was close!
18th December 2007 at 2:59 pm
Gordon Bennett! This guy can take us places!(not Gordon, obviously!)
18th December 2007 at 3:01 pm
Great result - and Nick’s wasted no time getting out some key messages. Brilliant.
The future just got a lot brighter.
18th December 2007 at 3:11 pm
Good speech. As Nick promised outward looking about Britain not us.
18th December 2007 at 3:23 pm
I am pleased both candidates had talked before the result and agreed that they’d work together no matter the result
I thing we now have a the foundations of a formidable front bench team with Clegg, Huhne, Cable, Kennedy (hopefully) and Ming
18th December 2007 at 3:30 pm
Has the number of spoilt papers been published?
18th December 2007 at 3:38 pm
I’m watching the speeches now, the BBC has put them online for those that couldn’t find it (took me a bit).
Vince is coming across well currently…
18th December 2007 at 4:00 pm
Good speeches from both and unquestionably the Party will now unite behind Nick. But what a remarkably close result on a turnout below last time.
This must make one wonder whether Chris would have edged it without the dreaded CC. I would love to know how that nonsensically titled document ever got leaked to the Beeb…………
18th December 2007 at 4:01 pm
Great news. Great first speech, and someone who I think whose voice will resonate with the British people.
18th December 2007 at 4:08 pm
Well done Nick. I am confident you will be an excellent leader and that the Liberal Democrats capture the public imagination. Our local party in Hackney is already growing significantly in its membership since the leadership contest started.
18th December 2007 at 4:08 pm
IT was nosensically titled if you know your Doris Day, Denis. - let’s move on.
Stephen Tall was YARDS out on his prediction
Nich Starling was MILES out
and
Linda Jack was CONTINENTS away from the actual result.
All right, I got the wrong winner, but I was a darn sight closer to the very close result.
18th December 2007 at 4:09 pm
Sorry - correction - too excited:
It was not nonsensically titled if you know your Doris Day, Denis. - let’s move on.
Stephen Tall was YARDS out on his prediction
Nich Starling was MILES out
and
Linda Jack was CONTINENTS away from the actual result.
All right, I got the wrong winner, but I was a darn sight closer to the very close result.
18th December 2007 at 4:14 pm
Congratulations to calamity clegg - if he thinks Huhne will give up his ambitions that easily he is more wet behind the ears than he looks!
18th December 2007 at 4:34 pm
Great result - 1 minute after the result was declared I carried on delivering Christmas cards in the constituency.
18th December 2007 at 4:55 pm
Well done Nick! I have great faith in your leadership and feel a renewed vigor as a member!
18th December 2007 at 5:10 pm
I wouldn’t listen to the ’slim mandate’ [Tory] brigade. The real mandate comes from the electorate at the end of the day.
If LibDems polling and votes go up that 500 vote leadership election majority will look decidedly irrelevant…
18th December 2007 at 5:23 pm
Well done to Nick, I’m disappointed Huhne didn’t win but Nick I’m sure will do a good job. I’m sorry that some Cleggites think the party has somehow been saved i.e. it would have been a disaster if Huhne had won. This was an election and a close one at that, not a coronation.
18th December 2007 at 5:28 pm
I wou;dn’t worry too much about the Tory Slim margin brigade look how much good it did Michael Howard to have a universal mandate.
18th December 2007 at 5:39 pm
Congratulations to Nick on winning and to both candidates on campaigns that were simply miles better than last time around.
But… a small quibble.
What is this “Nick Clegg’s Team” we are being invited to join from only £9 per year by the advertising banner near the head of this thread?
Have the Liberal Democrats gone all presidential? Will future candidates be taking a leaf from Cameron’s book and standing for “Nick Clegg’s Liberal Democrats”?
I hope not.
18th December 2007 at 5:55 pm
Congratulations to Nick, it was great to be there for the announcement. Obviously I’m really happy as a supporter, but also commiserations to Chris, who fought a very hard campaign, and gave such a warm and gracious speech.
Nick’s acceptance speech was briliant. The party, and that includes epecially the MPs, now need to unite behind Nick, and work for greater electoral success, which many of us feel so excited about.
18th December 2007 at 7:25 pm
Huzzah, Nick to lead1!!
18th December 2007 at 7:38 pm
The best result possible! Andy Higson is right above - we now have a charismatic leader, but one who knows that he had better take account of the WHOLE party. Well done to both candidates, and to our other ‘names’ - Kennedy, Ming, Vince - and the two leadership candidates. Why, I fancy we have more well known people that the Tories now…
18th December 2007 at 8:18 pm
They say third time lucky…
Persistence. Persistence. Persistence.
18th December 2007 at 9:00 pm
Bugger. Oh well. Who gets the fabulous prize? I won on PoliticalBetting.com, but I don’t think I’ve scored the double because I think my turnout estimate was too low. What’s the membership numbers again?
18th December 2007 at 9:08 pm
Further to Terry (27): I don’t think the list of better-known names on the Liberal benches needs to stop there. It seems to me that David Laws has every bit as much credibility as Michael Gove, and can be credited with more news discoveries. I personally rate Danny Alexander much higher than Chris Grayling, and Ed Davey, Steve Webb and Susan Kramer were all mooted as potential leadership contenders. I think the fact that every LD MP has to fight pretty hard for his seat ensures that there is no deadwood on their benches, and far more potential ministerial calibre.
18th December 2007 at 9:23 pm
My huge disappointment that Chris lost is mitigated by the fact that it was so very close. There is clearly no mood in the party for us to move in a more ‘Tory-friendly’ direction.
Chris made a great concession speech, and I only wish Nick’s had been as brief and incisive, still he will get better I’m sure.
Vince has done well as acting Leader, and I hope he stays on the front bench, but I hope Chris becomes the new Deputy Leader, that would really help unite the party in 2008.
18th December 2007 at 10:38 pm
jennie I’m stil waiting for official turnout figures (including spoilts}.
18th December 2007 at 11:00 pm
YES
18th December 2007 at 11:48 pm
Although Chris has sadly lost, he is in a very powerful position which I hope he will use to protect true Liberal values and prevent any drift to the right.
Almost half the party can’t be ignored.
18th December 2007 at 11:53 pm
Can someone explain to me where this “Chris is the guardian of the left” and “Nick is right wing” meme came from?
I didn’t vote, couldn’t decide, but I’m avowedly on the Left and call myself a socialist—I have no problem with Nick, and think on many issues (not all, but many) he’s closer to me than Chris.
I didn’t vote because they’re so very similar it made little difference. I can’t see how anyone can say that “half the party” voted for Chris as he’s on the left, unless they were following some other contest with weird debates I wasn’t aware of?
18th December 2007 at 11:56 pm
32 - 222 spoilts according to Colin Rosenstiel
19th December 2007 at 12:16 am
Giles - 27,30 - I was thinking of those my Mum would have heard of….
19th December 2007 at 12:33 am
Full details of the ballot are available here. I’ve amended the main post with further information.
19th December 2007 at 12:35 am
“Can someone explain to me where this “Chris is the guardian of the left” and “Nick is right wing” meme came from?”
Pretty much from their manifestos, at least in Chris’s case, the manifesto was very much something to unite tribes of the left.
Nick’s on the other hand was a broad liberal-coalition narrative rather than a right-wing one, with the breadth to appeal to David Laws as well as Steve Webb.
Both attracted support from across the party, but if anyone ever uses Liberty Research to test the matter I’d be surprised if we didn’t find that the centres of gravity of their supporters more broadly identified with the left and centre respectively.
19th December 2007 at 7:58 am
24 - Gordon
According to the LibDem entry in the Register of Political Parties, there is already the possibility of being a candidate for “Sir Menzies Campbell’s Liberal Democrats”. I am sure Nick Clegg’s name will be substituted.
Having calmed down a bit, and seen Nick vs Paxman last night, I do not feel so aghast at the vote, but do hope Nick can keep the momentum going.
19th December 2007 at 9:13 am
Andy Mayer: So there is the left and the centre, not the left and the right? Of course those on the left are on the extremes while those on the righ- I mean centre occupy the reasonable middle ground. Of course, it’s all clear now.
19th December 2007 at 10:00 am
Congratulations to Nick. Onwards and upwards from here!
19th December 2007 at 10:27 am
Andy Higson: Left and right are relative concepts and it depends what frame you use. To my mind the one that matters is where the British people sit not the internal polarity within the Liberal Democrat party, where ‘right’ is simply used as an insult to try and associate moderate people with the unsavory socially illiberal elements of the Conservative party, most of us spend our lives campaigning against.
This is clearly nonsense and objectively most people defined as right in this party come up as centrist in the various political compass tests that exist.
The left of this party on the other hand also come up as left in the same tests, and I don’t think most of our left-wingers have a problem with that although the more moderate use ‘centre-left’ to disassociate themselves from the politics of the wing-nuts in Respect and the Greens.
When YouGov analysed the self-indentification of voters on a left-right basis. The two interesting things were firstly that 80% could identify themeselves in that way, so to say left-right no longer matters is I suspect wishful thinking.
Secondly that over 50% of our voters identify as ‘dead centre’, about 35% as ’slightly left of centre’, and the rest mostly fanning out on the left with a small proportion on the slightly right of centre and next to no one beyond that.
The Labour party’s support interestingly is both more left-wing and more right-wing than ours, with a more left-wing centre of gravity than ours. The Conservative’s centre is right-wing not slightly right of centre, which is good news for us and bad news for David Cameron.
The evidence to my mind would tend to suggest Ming Campbell was wrong to define this party as left of centre. That’s a very important part of a out coalition but the largest group are centrists.
Further if we’re ever to form a government on our own terms we need to consider where we expand our support.
I’d argue taking on Labour and the loony parties on the left is both a smaller and less liberal opportunity than broadening support to appeal to one-nation liberals who Cameron is trying to woo back to the Tories, and the thinking liberal parts of the Labour coaltion that read the Guardian and Independent. There are more voters in both those groups than on the left territory we don’t currently reach, UK voters are normally distributed on the left-right scale.
Clearly that’s a crude analysis, but I’ve not yet heard a compelling electoral reason for the Liberal Democrats to quest for an opportunity on the left that would broadly amount to risking our core support and transforming the party into a sort of wet local-statist version of the bit of Labour that could never get elected.
19th December 2007 at 10:33 am
WITH A zero-point-whatever majority, Nick Clegg does not have a mandate to do whatever his most ardent right-wing — sorry — mainstream, supporters want him to.
The implication in Stephen Tall’s piece this morning is that Clegg has deliberately toned down his own views so as to appeal to party members who would certainly be frightened off by what those supporters want.
It would be ludicrous to adopt the Rizla-right position that the siren voices of our Tory entryists advocate.
There is no way we can squeeze in between the two conservative parties.
Our natural market is to be the party of the non-socialist Left, a fulcrum for the 5 million ‘disappeared’ Labour voters Jon Cruddas identifies and others who look in vain to Labour for economic and social justice.
I have enough faith in Nick Clegg’s judgment and intelligence to hope that he will move to this position.
It will propel us into the late 20s in percentage terms, which is where we start winning seats in direct proportion to our votes.
But not necessarily Tory ones, which is what, of course, the Rizla-right demand.
19th December 2007 at 11:13 am
Jonathan, I have to say I’m deeply sceptical of any electoral strategy that starts on the premise that we need to target people who don’t vote, because largley the effort to support ratio is low.
There are also many reasons why people don’t vote, the electoral system, contentment, not seeing the point, having no interest in politics etc. It would be wrong to conclude from low-voter turn-out though that such voters are concentrated at the extremes or on the left. There are plenty of disinterested righties out there right as well… can we agree to leave most of that kind of out-reach work to the Tories at least?
There are also plenty of parties out there offering 60%+ tax rates, gold plated social justice and a glorious Chavista dawn for the proletariat. The extremes of UK are well represented by a multiplicity of small parties. They are happily an electoral irrelevance, as most people in this country are moderates.
As then for the two old lies that the centre-ground is crowded and Labour is seen as another conservative party… there are many more voters in the centre than on the wings and only 3 parties. There are numerous parties on the left and right, particularly the left. And on Labour’s conservatism the voters clearly don’t agree, Labour is the largest party on the left and that is where their centre-of-gravity lies… even after ten years of so-called New Labour administration. Maybe it has something to do with the record high levels of tax and spending this country is currently suffering… which typically is what people associate with being left-wing…
Our point of distinction with Labour and the Tories is surely their statism, and tendency to attract extreme support on their wings. The radical liberal centrist tradition of this party, reaching out to moderates in both directions I feel is something to be proud of. I see no sense at all in launching alienating attacks on voters in either the liberal centre-left or centre-right. We can win their support, we are their natural party. And we need it if we ever wish to form a government, rather than bleat on the sidelines like a pressure-group interested only in permanent opposition.
19th December 2007 at 12:10 pm
So Jonathan Hunt thinks we’re non-socialist left-wingers whose destiny is to target ex-Labour supporters, while Iain Dale thinks it goes without saying our role is to be a stepladder to Downing Street for (allegedly) moderate Tories.
If nothing else, that really underlines how Nick’s first task is to ignore the clamour from the fringes and say what HE thinks we are - loudly, clearly and (hopefully) finally.
I’m sure there’s a 1001 reasons why he couldn’t do it, but I wish he’d said during his campaign “no post-election coalitions with either party, guaranteed, so don’t even pick up the phone”. It would have made this next bit so much easier…
19th December 2007 at 12:27 pm
Andy: Left and Right in this context is a relative term, and expressed as such because that is what most people understand.
We have been the party of the Left ever since New Blue Labour shifted significantly to the centre, wherever that is, and now to an inside-right slot.
To deny that is revert to a French general: ‘There is ze left and ze right and above them all is De Gaulle.’
We are where we are because the others moved. To move with them a decade later would be a true denial of our traditional values and principles.
Our new leader must not shift position, but spell out what Liberal Democrats stand for and relate these values to current circumstances and situations. In Nick Clegg we have a leader capable of achieving this.
People on what we must call the non-socialist Left don’t vote because not all have seen us as the party that represents their feelings and concerns.
THe majority that does vote opts for parties of the centre because that is all they see displayed on the shelves.
People buy products, even if they are not what they seek, because of a perceived absence of what they realy want.
The secret of commercial — and, I would argue, electoral — success as well, is to offer what people believe they want, provided sufficient of them want it in the required quantities.
It can be much more profitable to be the market leader in one segment rather than a secondary or tertiary brand in a different, albeit larger, segment.
Most of us believe in the market, subject to effective controls to prevent abuse or adverse effects on individuals or groups.
But I would not venture so far into marketing jargon to suggest the blatantly Blairite: ‘Make what you can sell, not sell what you can make.’
What we already make, or advocate, is excellent. It a challenge to Mr Clegg’s obvious communications skills to persuade enough voters that it is what they really want as well.
The longer we try to be all all things to all voters, the longer we shall be distrusted by a market we could command.
19th December 2007 at 1:41 pm
“The longer we try to be all all things to all voters, the longer we shall be distrusted by a market we could command.”
I agree, I suggest like Nick we focus on being a liberal party. Forward to a non-socialist-left future just doesn’t sound as catchy…
And I really do suggest you look at the polling evidence before assuming that Labour’s massive tax rises makes people think of them as right-wing.
19th December 2007 at 1:51 pm
The big issue is of course what people mean themselves when they self define as “left wing”. Economically left? Socially left (and therefore liberal)? Politically left (and therefore in favour of reform of the state apparatus)?
The term is in current parlance mostly used around economics, but it originally meant political reform. By that definition, we’re radically left wing on most issues. On economics, we’re liberal centre-ish, preferring a mixed but liberal market, with proper guarantees of competition, access to markets an dsupport for institutions. On social issues, we’re also for the most part fairly radical.
On aggregate, we’re a liberal/left coalition, but the growth possible is from the liberals currently residing in both other parties—some of them may be economically ‘right’, or more opposed to political reform, but we still identify with them.
We need to rebuild the old Liberal/Whig coalition, that means getting the Liberal Radicals back from Labour and the Whiggish Liberal Unionists back from the Conservative and Unionist party. If we could get rid of the Tories we’ve inexplicably picked up within our own ranks I’d be even happier.
Andy, you’re right in most respects, people can self define as left and right. But what do they mean, and what do they think of, when they talk in those terms? A lot of ‘left’ issues are really up/down issues on the political compass, and thus even Cameron is onto our ground (just barely).
19th December 2007 at 2:09 pm
Whigs and Liberal Unionist voters. Now there is a target demographic to build a winning election strategy around.
19th December 2007 at 2:47 pm
“Andy, you’re right in most respects, people can self define as left and right. But what do they mean?”
It’s a fair question Matt and regrettably YouGov didn’t provide a qualitative dataset to accompany their poll.
That analysis though would be more about probably incorrectly using left and right definitions to try and pin down a coherent set of political ideas and target voters.
At this level of discussion it’s really more about language. It is for example rather silly for us to go around calling ourselves a left-wing or centre-left party if most of our voters self-indentify as centrists.
Particularly as the left-right allusions carry the downside of putting off self-identifiers of the opposite persuasion, whereas centrism rarely invokes hositility and the same is true of liberalism.
We don’t happily have the US situation where liberal is used incorrectly to mean left. The US usage itself being a result of Reagan’s very successful attempts in the 70s and 80s to rebrand the word as a pejorative to help push the democrats out of the centre-ground. On that basis it chills me when people on our own side misuse liberalism in the same way.
19th December 2007 at 3:22 pm
@ Ed—I’m not saying they’re key demographics, but I am saying that when the old Liberal party split in the 20s, some of that tradition went to the Conservatives and some to Labour: There are non-Tory Conservatives, and there are some very Liberal labourites.
If we’re to rebuild the party and take office, we need those descended from those traditions back with us, we need the centre ground undecideds to take us seriously. That’s I think what Clegg’s been trying to get at during his campaign, and although I didn’t vote for him I agree with him.
I most certainly agree with Andy on the principle he’s making with, I’m just not sure I agree with some of his use of language. Although I agree completely 100% on the last paragraph.
If you think the US definition of ‘liberal’ is close to correct, please go away, read some JS Mill, or at least a precis, and understand what it really means… /elitist intellectual snobbery