Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg could be the surprise winner of the UK’s general election, former US presidential candidate Howard Dean has said. Mr Dean praised Mr Clegg as a “young, dynamic leader”. And he said he could be the big winner from Britain’s first televised election debates, capitalising on disillusion with the two larger parties.

Speaking to BBC Parliament and US network C-Span, Mr Dean said:

I don’t think there’ll ever be a coalition between the Liberals and the Labour government. I know the Liberals, I know Nick Clegg very well, and he intends to win this and I think they could. So you may have a hung Parliament but I think you won’t have a coalition. At least not that coalition going forward.”

“It’s a different [electoral] system ours, first-past-the-post, but I think the debates are going to be enormously helpful to everybody. He is a young, dynamic leader that they don’t know much about and the Brits really would like a change. Just the fact that Labour and the Conservatives are so close shows that the Conservatives are not what they want either.

“They’re mad at Labour, they don’t want the Conservatives, they happen to have a young dynamic leader, leading a party that in fact has been in power in Britain and run governments in Britain, although not for the past many decades, and I think those debates are going to put them all on an equal footing and I think Nick Clegg could make a lot of hay out of this.”

And asked if Nick could be the next British prime minister, Mr Dean said: “I think he could”. Well, that may be a bridge too far for the moment. But all support is welcome, and an endorsement from Howard Dean is no small tribute to the efforts the Lib Dems have put into fostering alliances with the US Democrats.

If the exclusive Voice audio version of Howard Dean’s speech is not pressing enough of your buttons already, the party has now made a full, professional video of the speech here

Ed Davey is currently introducing Howard Dean and doing his level best to hitch the Lib Dems to the Obama wagon. You have to feel sympathy for the man. I was lucky enough to be one of the bloggers interviewing him this morning (full write up coming soon), and we did our best to prod the same sort of indiscretion out of him. As a broadly left-wing sympathiser in terms of British politics, could he detect differences between us and Labour? No dice.

And indeed Howard Dean begins with a disclaimer “to put off the international incident” by saying that the Democratic Party will work with whoever the British people elect to serve them.

Dean starts by saying he has some small experience of Britain and how it has changed. He spent a year at a British public school about thirty-five years ago (“Good god, he hates us,” is the assessment of the LDV cupboard).

12.26 It’s just as well I’m not in the hall or I would be making a cheering spectacle of myself. He’s describing the Democrats’ essential strategy of “behaving like a national party”, asking everybody for their vote, including people who they had not asked before, in many cases for decades. This was, essentially, a question I asked him this morning, about the contrast between the 50 state strategy and the Liberal Democrat emphasis of heavily targeting resources – even to the point of importing activists.

He also says it’s important to use the language of the people you’re talking to – not to change your message, but to put it in terms of what you have in common. He cites the example of young evangelical Christians in the US electorate – they were concerned about international poverty, Darfur and climate change. All Democrat issues. There is no person in America, he believes, who cannot be asked to vote Democrat.

He then talks about the flaws of isolationism, especially in terms of the global economic crisis. America is now seeking to rebuild relationships around the world, with no junior partners. The Obama administration is committed to responsible withdrawal from Iraq.

At this point I’m afraid I disappeared upstairs to tempt outgoing speech-listeners to our upcoming LDV fringe event ce soir. “Have a picture of Obama, as personally torn up by me.” The flyers are two A5s to a side of A4 and we don’t have any scissors. I think it just adds to our enthusiastic amateur image. And I am sticking to that.

But I can tell you that the speech was packed out into the fire exits and overran by twenty minutes but nobody seemed to mind. Warm applause to end, and my flyers were gone in about half a minute. Read up on the bits of the speech I missed while walking up and up and round and round the Harrogate conference centre spiral walkway here.

Continuing our exciting use of new technology, Helen Duffett brings Howard Dean to the 12seconds.tv platform

Video: Governor Howard Dean talks to @libdemvoice. #ldconf on 12seconds.tv

It’s nice to know he’s enjoying his time here. I’ve heard many positive reports from his private meetings with party staff, and we’re waiting with bated breath for the reports of his meeting with bloggers.

And of course in just over 30 minutes, he’ll be speaking from the main platform. I’m planning to be sitting in the auditorium with my mic so that we can podcast his words later this afternoon.

What Obama did last year was truly impressive – but impressive in quality and scale and eloquence rather than in innovation. When it came to breaking new ground in picking technologies to use and structuring a campaign around involving people rather than ordering them around, in many ways it was Dean who the innovator, whilst Obama was the hugely successful implementer.

Part of Dean’s appeal was and is his understanding of the sort of grassroots campaigning that immediately feels familiar to the Liberal Democrats. Brian Robson posted up yesterday this great quote from him:

Every day I’d leave work and drive directly to the ward to knock on doors. I knew if I went home first I’d find all sorts of reasons not to go back and pound the pavement. You’ve got to screw up your courage to go and knock on strangers’ doors. Every day I’d bang on a hundred doors. I knocked on every door in the ward twice over the summer and fall. One woman answered the door and said, “You must really want this.” “Yes I do”, I replied.

Absolutely! And what Dean did so well, both in much of his Presidential bid and then in his term as chair of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) was to find ways to take that enthusiasm and hunger for grassroots
engagement and inspire others to follow the same path. His 50 states strategy – not wanting to neglect weak areas whilst not taking away from the importance of key states and key swing districts – is something I think we can learn much from (and is a topic I wrote about last May).

The way he inspired people to get to their keyboards and help write the software his campaign needed – with the Coders for Dean – is also the spark behind the drive for volunteers we’ve started through our new Technology Advisory Board.

And his path-breaking work on the use of emails is something that we can learn from too, not just centrally but in all our local parties too.

So I’m really looking forward to Howard Dean’s visit – and if you can make it to our conference in Harrogate, I hope you can take the opportunity to enjoy it too at first hand.