The front-runner in the race to be the next leader of the Liberal Democrats tried to lift the ambitions of his party yesterday, with a declaration that settling for third place at elections was not good enough.

Nick Clegg, the home affairs spokesman, who appears to have shot ahead of his only rival, Chris Huhne, promised in his first big speech of the campaign to avoid the “sat-nav” politics of the Labour and Conservative parties.

Mr Clegg, 40, predicted that breaking the “stifling deadlock” of two-par-ty politics was a realistic goal within a decade. “The so-called modernisers in the Labour and Conservative parties are much clearer about what they don’t believe in, than what they do. They talk endlessly of change, but that change is defined in the narrowest of terms, in the language of tactical positioning. The result is the sat-nav politics we are seeing today: turn this way to shore up the core vote, that way for the floating vote. Go left for the approval of the Mirror, right for The Sun. This is the politics of the marketing man – a hollow, gutless politics.”

He said some argued that the best the Liberal Democrats could hope for in any future election was third place and a toehold in government. “That surely cannot be our aim. Third place is not good enough. Not good enough for me, for the party or for Britain.”

Mr Clegg identified the five main challenges that he said the Liberal Democrats were best able to confront - empowering individuals, extending opportunity, balancing security and liberty, protecting the environment and engaging with the world.

He said that social mobility had stalled and that he would work for “a society in which everyone has the opportunity to progress as far as their talents and hard work can take them”.

In conclusion, he said: “The politics of the 21st century will increasingly be played out on liberal territory. And we will have home advantage.”

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