If God were a Liberal, the old wry adage always ran, there would not have been the Ten Commandments but merely Ten Suggestions. Not when it comes to the matter of their party leadership there wouldn’t have been. For the second time in a mere 22 months, Liberal Democrat MPs have moved with astonishing speed and venom to remove their master. That the individual concerned was elected by the whole party and not a parliamentary cabal has proved an irrelevance. Charles Kennedy was deposed for being too drunk; now Sir Menzies Campbell has been removed for being too sober. The former, however, could hardly complain that his colleagues had not offered him the chance to mend his ways.

Sir Menzies is much more entitled to be shocked at his treatment. Caesar had a better fate at the hands of Cassius and Brutus. That his assassins, not the man himself, emerged at 6.30pm last night to announce his decision for him speaks volumes about what occurred behind the scenes at Westminster yesterday.

The decision itself is superficially logical and wildly irrational at the same time. It is logical in that there were legitimate doubts as to whether Sir Menzies could hold his party together for a general election that we now know is unlikely to occur until 2009 and possibly not until 2010 if adverse economic conditions delay it further.

By that time the Liberal Democrat leader would have been knocking on 70; and while this might be deemed sprightly by the standards of the Chinese Communist Party it is thought positively senile by contemporary British standards. Whether this outrageous ageism is fair seems not to be a matter of public discussion.

One certainly wonders what William Gladstone would have thought of it, but then again he did not have to cope with the insane demands of modern opposition, never mind the strains of government in our era.

The irrationality, nonetheless, lies in the sense of panic that produced this outcome. The past month has been the maddest in British politics for aeons. The polls have swung around as if on the sort of stuff that Pete Doherty considers to be medication. It has been the Liberal Democrats who have suffered more than any other camp from this process. Their fate since early September has been the precise reverse of that of the England rugby union squad during the World Cup.

The boys in white started appallingly and then suddenly played out of their skins against Australia and France to surpass national expectations. The Liberal Democrats had a perfectly decent conference in Brighton, which ended with the most eloquent address that Sir Menzies has ever delivered on domestic policy. It appeared, as this newspaper, like others, noted, that the leadership issue had been settled partly by his performance but also by the assumption that a November 1 hustings was heading down the track at high speed, making a change at the top untenable.

Instead, the Liberal Democrats have had the stuffing knocked out of them. A mere two weeks ago they were positioned at a slightly disappointing but hardly catastrophic 15-17 per cent average in the opinion polls. When the Conservative Party announced its proposals for inheritance tax, though, something truly weird happened to them. They experienced a drop in the polls that was as sharp, if not sharper, than the one that hit them back in 1976, when their leader was accused of plotting to murder his homosexual lover.

I know that the British take the value of their property more seriously than most, but this movement in the numbers defies sensible evaluation. Can it really be the case, as these surveys of the public imply, that around 5 per cent of the population were Liberal Democrats by inclination but not if they thought that the Tories would make it easier for them to pass on their homes without taxation?

It is the strange nature of the conditions that triggered this coup that should also make Liberal Democrats contemplate more deeply what they have done and whether doing it in this fashion was becoming. Neither Simon Hughes nor Vincent Cable (nor I) have the faintest clue what has convulsed the political scene so violently in such a short period of time. They have no idea whether removing their leader will revive their party. All that Liberal Democrat MPs understand is that something has happened that, if an election were held soon (which it will not be), would allow them to be decimated. I cannot avoid the conclusion that they should have waited for Christmas, by which time it would have been clearer if what has taken place in the polls is a blip or, at a minimum, there might be more of an explanation for why they have been battered.

They have not allowed themselves that space in which to assess the evidence. Instead, they are in for what could be thought the worst of all situations. There will be yet another battle for the leadership but in such a short timeframe that none of the candidates can be sure what it is that the voters have decided is wrong with the Liberal Democrats and what they should be doing to correct this. The party has saddled itself with less an internal election than a surreal political version of blind man’s bluff.

Despite that, there is only one direction that the Liberal Democrats can and should take to limit the damage of this debacle. Nick Clegg is so plainly the superior contender for the post that, if he does not win, the party will have opted for collective suicide after committing two murders.

As a telegenic young figure from the party’s Centre Right he would compete again for the support that seems, for whatever reason, to have slipped away at warp speed to the Conservatives. All of which means that the principal beneficiary from Sir Menzies’s harsh demise may be his old friend, the Prime Minister.

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