While headlines at this week’s Lib Dem conference will turn on whether Sir Menzies Campbell, the leader, receives a longer standing ovation than Charles Kennedy, the man he deposed, political pros will focus on the man many think should already be leading the party: Clegg, MP for Sheffield Hallam.

If a politician can best be measured by the private assessment of enemies in other parties, Clegg has a glittering future. The bright brains around Cameron veer between laudatory admiration and baffled irritation that Clegg is not one of them.

But if he is to have that glittering future, Clegg, 39, has to win over Lib Dem activists, not Tories. And that will be tricky for he is everything a lot of them despise: clever, economically literate, bristling with ideas, socially adept, media-astute — above all a winner.

In dress and speech he could be the man from Thomas Pink; “Tory in disguise”, huff the party’s tofu tendency. They point to his stint working for Sir Leon Brittan, the then Tory-appointed commissioner in Brussels, his association with a young gang of right-leaning “Orange Book” Liberals, and his suggestion that “breaking up the NHS is exactly what you do need to do to make it a more responsive service”. He would argue that he, not the tofu munchers, are the real liberals, as he believes in economic as well as social liberty.

And if he were really a Tory he probably would not have started out life unconventionally as a “ski bum” and a fact checker for the polemicist Christopher Hitchens. Clegg also confesses to writing a novel of “adolescent tripe”, the yellowing manuscript of which he has, “cringingly”, rediscovered. And while a glance at his education — Westminster, Cambridge — is Establishment, his family is exotic.

His Dutch mother “arrived in Europe emaciated aged 12 after spending the war in a Japanese prisoner of war camp”. His clan also contains vodka-gulping white Russians who hung out with theatricals such as Gielgud. Oh, and as if to prove his European credentials, Clegg’s wife Miriam — with whom he has two young children — is Spanish. He met her in Brussels.

“War and revolution have had a huge effect on my family,” he says, “and certainly affected what we talked about round the kitchen table.”

But perhaps Clegg’s greatest asset is that he shares with Cameron and the young Blair that ability to chortle at himself: he ruefully recalls a youthful TV appearance on which two panellists fell asleep while he was talking.

He recognises that pandering to party panjandrums is not the way to win. So in this interview he questions whether Lib Dems in a hung parliament should prop up an increasingly “discredited” Labour party led by Gordon Brown. Which is precisely what Tories fear Campbell is plotting with Brown on their regular flights back to Edinburgh.

Clegg also argues Lib Dems shouldn’t bang on so loudly about electoral reform being a condition for support in a hung parliament. “There is a danger of it looking like we are more concerned about getting our bums on seats than in engaging with issues the public cares about.”

Clegg, like his other Orange Bookers, admires the political dexterity of Cameron, arguing it is “silly to deny” his guile. But he also questions whether Cameron can “walk the liberal walk as well as talk the talk”.

If Clegg is to win a leadership election he must shine as home affairs spokesman. He recognises his challenge is to overturn prejudices that his party cares more for the rights of criminals than the safety of the public.

So in Brighton this week he will call for the building of special prisons for psychopaths, compulsory education for prisoners, and the monitoring of arrivals and departures at airports. He even says that “a life sentence should mean life. Sentencing has become a joke to the public”.

Clegg admits the party has to work harder to be heard if three-party politics is to flourish. He sees it as a big test of the party’s acceptance of “dry, fiscal discipline” this week — and thus of the party’s credibility — that it endorses the leadership’s plan to partially privatise the Post Office.

More eyes, however, will be on Kennedy. “I can’t stop people taking out clapometers but I really don’t know who will receive the longest round of applause,” he laughs. “Naturally he will be given a very warm reception and deserves one.”

So will he attempt to be the man who makes a party leader’s speech one day? He bats it away several times, praising first Campbell then the potential of young rivals, but eventually he gives in and smiles: “Yeah, I might do.” The question Lib Dems need to ponder is whether they are serious enough about politics to give him the chance.

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