A different sort of 2006

To play this what if? you need to wind back to May 2005. In this alternative version, Charles announces not that he is going on and on, but that he intends to lead the party for the first half of the parliament, and let his successor have a couple of years to get to grips with the job (I don't find many people who suggest that Charles should have gone on until after the next election). It helps if you imagine that at least one of the "tired and emotional" moments did not happen and that Sandra Gidley did not mind so much about the one she knew of because Charles was going anyway. Last of all (and this is a big ask) you have to decide that in the absence of the tumult among insiders, Daisy Sampson would not have run the Kennedy "treatment for alcoholism" story.

In this scenario, there is no leadership election. As a result, perhaps Oaten is not outed and Hughes' (less damaging) private life remains a secret.

No leadership election means less press coverage, but assume that we had a couple of extra points in the opinion polls leading up to the local elections. What next?

Closets open anyway?

In April Labour were swamped by their own scandals. Perhaps they would have responded by pushing the stories on our lot out into the open. If they had not, they would be unexploded bombs, ready to go off nearer the election.

But if they hadn't exploded then, we might have won more council seats - perhaps up to one hundred more, and trimmed the Tory total by up to fifty. The results would still have been seen as good for Cameron, and he would still have had his boost, but perhaps a little less than he did get.

Drift?

Jonathan Calder put the Kennedy problem well: "It wasn't the drink that did for Charles Kennedy: it was the drift."

One consequence of there being no leadership contest is that there would have been no push for what became the Green Tax Switch. Another would certainly have been that the leadership would have stood back from the tax plans.

Lots of lib dems would have liked this, either because they were against these specific proposals (and I didn't like all of them) or because they think that the leadership leading is not "democratic" (I couldn't disagree more). But the outcome might well have been chaos.

Dealing with the negatives

One theme of Ming Campbell's leadership (like it or not) has been a concerted attempt to deal with some of the policies that count against us. He dealt with the "votes for Ian Huntley" problem in May, while conference moved us away from our high tax image in September. The emphasis now on crime is a further effort to deal our negatives.

None of this is very glamorous - and is an investment for the future rather than something that will pay off in the Opinion Polls immediately. Would we have done it in my alternative 2006? Probably not. Is it worth doing? Yes.

One last bonus for the year is that our policies are starting to hang together better. Our policy on the environment now hangs together better with our tax policy, and our tax policy now fits together with our proposals on poverty and benefits. You could almost say that something like a Lib Dem approach is emerging ("keep it simple" could almost be our slogan). Again, I don't think that we would have had this in the alternative 2006.

What next?

Hangover and children allowing, I'll deal with this tomorrow. But dealing with the negatives is not the same as providing the positives, and we face a challenging year in 2007. One concern is that when the loans for peerages issue flares up, we seem to suffer (some voters seem to rally around Labour). It probably will flare up in the New Year.

Anyway

It is a personal view and I could easily draw up both rosier and gloomier scenarios for an alternative 2006. For much of the real 2006 things seemed quite tough. Most lib dems will have looked with great envy at the press Cameron has got. Perhaps my rosiest thought for the New Year is that the British press likes to build people up just to knock'em down.