The agenda for Liberal Democrat Conference in March has been released today. Spring conference isn’t normally that fiery, so you things can easily slip under the radar, particularly the typically dull constitutional amendments.
One about triggering a leadership election rather caught my eye though:
If this amendment were to pass, it would make it significantly easier to instigate a vote of no confidence in the Lib Dem leader.
This is interesting in itself, but what is even more noticeable is the names of the people behind it.
Ed Joyce led Lembit Opik’s ill fated London Mayor campaign, and co-authored a book with him.
The premise of that book, you probably don’t remember, is that Nick Clegg needed to go in order for the Lib Dems to stand a chance at the next general election, and it is still on Amazon:
It seems fairly obvious then, that this is part of Lembit Opik trying to remove Nick Clegg from the leadership. However, his brand is so clearly tainted that he couldn’t even put his name to his own coup attempt, instead having to use one of his few remaining allies.
Lembit Opik himself was tweeting the other day that he considered the upcoming Eastleigh by-election a test of Clegg’s leadership, so it’s clearly on his mind:
Huhne’s resignation makes Eastleigh by/election a test case for Clegg’s leadership. No point in pretending otherwise
— Lembit Öpik (@lembitopik) February 4, 2013
The debate on this will happen on Saturday morning, when most people are still in bed…is Lembit actually going to win something? Probably not.
what on earth is Lembit up to with this bizarre proposal to change the Party Constitution to say Conference can call a leadership election ?http://digitalpolitico.net/2013/02/06/team-lembit-try-and-make-it-easier-to-clear-out-clegg/