OK, so I said I would wait until after his first PMQs to sound the Death Knell on Clegg, but I'm prepared to eat humble pie if I'm wrong, so I'm going to post now.

Y'all want to know why I'm so bothered that Clegg won? Y'all want to know why I think he's going to be such a disaster for the Lib Dems? Rob Knight commented on Charlotte Gore's blog that he couldn't understand why it matters so much who leads the party. From the point of view of a party member, I can understand this. Lib Dems are not about cults of personality, as Rob says, and thus they don't (or won't) understand that the Mainstream media is totally about cults of personality, and it's the mainstream media that will decide their fortunes.

In the last Lib Dem leadership election, the media was overwhelmingly for Ming. Safe pair of hands, they said. Respected elder statesman, they said. So, like lambs to the slaughter, the lib dem party members voted Ming in... and the media crucified him. They made him so completely ineffectual as a party leader that he ended up resigning because of it, and then the media crucified the party for losing a leader so soon after losing Champagne Charlie.

See, the media likes crucifying people. They really do. Left, right, up, down, liberal or totalitarian, there is nothing they like more than ripping people to shreds.

This time around, the media's preferred candidate is Clegg. Time for the younger generation they said. The Great Communicator they said... You can see where I'm going here, can't you? Why do you think Clegg is the media's preferred candidate, boys and girls? Because they think he will be the easiest and most fun to bring down.

I know you don't want my predictions, but you're going to get them anyway. Within two months, if not tomorrow, Clegg will be being portrayed as:

- foppish posh boy who crumples under fire
- steering the party to the right
- Cameron-lite
- pointless flip-flopper who will say anything to garner a vote

and, sadly, but predictably, given how the MSM leapt on the Vince Bandwagon so easily:

- not as effective as Vince.

Policy that most of the public actually agrees with, but which they never normally get to hear about, will remain unconveyed to the public by the MSM, and Lib Dem support, which has ratcheted during the leadership contest because the MSM have pretty much HAD to at least mention policy will plummet, as it did under Ming, because the only mention the party will get is to be laughed at.

Now, Huhne would not have been immune from the media scrum, but he used to be a journalist, and he knows how the game is played, and he would have been the least awful of the two options.

All this is, naturally, IMHO. And I do have humble pie on stand by. Honestly, the happiest thing for me would be if I got to eat it. But I bet I don't.