Well what can you say? You sleep in because you were up until gone 4AM watching Super Bowl XLVII and you wake up to Chris Huhne changing his plea to guilty and all hell breaking loose. Obviously due to the ongoing trial I can’t type too much about the case only that Chris Huhne is clearly a moron and thought that he could lie and bully his way out of a problem.
The sad thing about all of this is that is was so needless. If you are going to break the law in such a small way (speeding) then all lying about it does is give it a chance to come back and bite you in the bum at a later date. Yes getting a driving ban would be annoying as hell for a driver but some of us don’t drive through choice and you know what – we manage to get to places we need to get to. Just because you can’t drive doesn’t mean the world stops turning. It isn’t that great a thing in the grand scheme of things.
Chris Huhne was clearly a very gifted MP and his work as Energy & Climate Change Secretary was really quite impressive. His performance at the Cancun Climate Change Conference was one of the best things any coalition cabinet member has done so far despite the fact it was not widely reported on. He was certainly the best positioned MP to challenge Nick Clegg as leader (Tim Farron’s position as not having been in cabinet probably hurts him in reality) and I know personally of Lib Dems who were desperate for Huhne to be found not guilty and then run at Nick Clegg sooner rather than later. However this will now not be the case.
Nick Clegg’s rather terse statement today saying he was ‘shocked and saddened’ and that Huhne had done ‘absolutely the right thing’ in resigning as an MP. What Nick Clegg wanted to say was that he was extremely pissed off with Huhne for lying about speeding and not only that, he compounded the lie by reiterating his innocence time and time again. Chris Huhne has been a thorn in Nick Clegg’s side for several years now and whilst he has now removed that thorn he has been left with one giant headache.
Now all that is waiting for Huhne is time at Her Majesty’s Pleasure. His career in tatters but he’s a millionaire who’ll do ok when he comes out but just not in politics. What disappoints me most about all of this is both Huhne doing it in the first place but secondly about how confident and dismissive he was when the charges were originally brought against him. He was so confident he would never be charged and then that it’d never reach trial that he has come across as a rather arrogant and nasty man. I don’t even recall him apologising for his actions today (although he may have not been able to say much because of the ongoing trial of his ex-wife) but still.
So Chris Huhne is going down but will the Lib Dems go down in Eastleigh? I’ll look into that later today…
