IF IT IS ANY consolation to Liberal Democrats, they are not holding the most surreal election in Europe; that honour must belong to the Church of Sweden. The battle for its most senior berth, the archbishopric of Stockholm, is open to any adherents of the faith, irrespective of whether they enjoy formal qualifications, and is ultimately settled by a decision of all followers. In this race, both the brother and the sister of the outgoing leader, Karl Gustav Hammar, are in the running. To make matters even more interesting, the former recently wrote a newspaper attacking the latter, in part because she is a lesbian. The first round of this tantalising tussle takes place on Wednesday.

At about the same time, in a not entirely inappropriate coincidence, ballot papers will land through the letterboxes of about 75,000 Liberal Democrat members. Nobody knows what they will do with them. After the events of this campaign, they might be forgiven for making them into a hat or a paper plane, or quietly hiding such embarrassing material from the children. A few weeks ago I compared the contenders in this struggle with characters from The Muppet Show. I wondered then whether this might be slightly harsh. It was. An apology is offered to the late Jim Henson, Kermit, Miss Piggy and the rest of them.

Yet Liberal Democrats should do their electoral duty. This is, despite the many opportunities for mockery, an immensely important competition for them. It is possibly first time since the selection of David Steel in 1976 — even perhaps since the 1920s — that the choice of leader has been taking place with the party knowing that it could might hold the balance of power after the next election. There may have been a strong element of circus slapstick so far, but the Liberal Democrats cannot end up by presenting a clown to the country. For there is no certainty that they will return enough MPs in 2009-2010 to have the influence that they should aspire to. A retreat to the dismal total of 20 to 25 MPs is quite possible.

The conventional wisdom is that revelations about the — well, liberal — sexuality of Simon Hughes have done for him and thus Chris Huhne, the “dark horse”, is the true threat to Sir Menzies Campbell. An increasingly confident Mr Huhne is said to be making an advance by exploiting his unique selling points in terms of age and lifestyle. His informal slogan seems to be: “Still has his own teeth and no skeletons in the cupboard.”

I am not sure about the accuracy of this assessment. Mr Hughes is a well-known and beloved figure in Liberal Democrat circles. Even those who would not vote for him warm to him. Plenty of party members agree with the policy he has expressed for decades. There will also be a “stuff the media” aspect to their considerations (not that such sentiments should be encouraged). While I do not believe that Hughes is (or was) destined to prevail, I would be surprised if he did not record a decent tally. He won three in four votes to become party president (admittedly against Lembit Opik) less than 18 months ago. That kind of popularity rarely dies overnight.

Nor is Mr Huhne wholly impressive. At the start of this year he was widely seen as one of the “Orange Book” brigade — a dedicated party moderniser. Since then he has had more flip-flops than Bournemouth beach at the height of summer.

He has called for a fixed timetable for the withdrawal of British troops from Iraq, a stance which is risky to the threshold of reckless, and implicitly criticised Sir Menzies for advising Charles Kennedy against speaking alongside Tariq Ali, Tony Benn and George Galloway at an anti-war rally. He was a supporter of Britain’s nuclear deterrent, but now that such notable pacific nations as Iran and North Korea are after the bomb he suggests it would be safe to downgrade to the military equivalent of a peashooter. He is a serious authority on economics, yet has suddenly obtained a passion for taxing numerous unenvironmental activities and today seems content to “soak the rich” with a new top rate of income tax. For some reason, many of his colleagues detect a whiff of opportunism about his repositioning. A person is, of course, entitled to a “road to Damascus” experience. It should not involve a bypass from political realism. It would not be hard for Tories and Labour to contend that he lacked credibility.

Which leaves Sir Menzies as the rightful front-runner. It has been sniffed that he has conducted a “lacklustre” campaign. In the light of what has happened to some of his rivals, he could retort that being relatively dull in such company might be an advantage.

Some of the criticism, though, is valid. Sir Menzies should be more explicit about domestic political issues, although in fairness there is plenty of that for those who are curious enough to look at his website. Sir Menzies should also stop being filmed on television approaching electors in an aristocratic coat that makes him look like Sir Alec Douglas-Home’s lovechild (one of the few angles on scandal that has been missed in this saga, come to think of it). He should make more of the youthful and talented team behind him. There is no shame in being frank that he will probably command his party through just one election.

Sir Menzies’s opponents — notably Mr Huhne — have hinted that he is too much an “Establishment” man to be placed in charge of the third party. One could conclude, by contrast, that after nearly nine decades in the political wilderness, to project an image of being at ease with government might be judged an electoral asset.

If Liberal Democrat members want to maximise their chances of acquiring office (itself a debateable proposition), then they will turn to the obvious choice rather than the radical or the novel one.

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