THE knives are coming out for Mr Nice Guy. A surprising surge of support for Mike Huckabee, the former Republican governor of Arkansas who had long seemed a rank outsider in the 2008 presidential race, has turned him into a target six weeks before voting in Iowa.

Running on a shoestring budget as an affable conservative with unrivalled religious qualifications (he is a former Baptist minister), Huckabee has previously been dismissed as an underfunded no-hoper. He is mostly known for a quirky sense of humour and his skills on bass guitar – he plays for a band called Capitol Offense.

All that changed last week when an opinion poll propelled Huckabee close to the top of the Republican heap in Iowa, the traditional launching pad for presidential careers. He has overtaken Rudolph Giuliani, the former mayor of New York, and Fred Thompson, the former senator and Hollywood actor, and is trailing Mitt Romney, the former Massachusetts governor, by less than the poll’s margin of error.

The success of Huckabee’s stealth campaign has shaken up the Republican race and forced hurried reassessments of conservative voter behaviour before the Iowa caucuses on January 3 and the New Hampshire primary five days later.

Yet it has also provoked a flurry of investigations into Huckabee’s chequered record as Arkansas governor and his potentially damaging history of ethical and financial upsets.

“National media folk rave about what a nice guy Huckabee is,” said Quin Hillyer, a former editorial writer at the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette newspaper. “If only they did a little home-work they would discover a guy with a thin skin, a nasty vindictive streak and a history of imbroglios about questionable ethics.”

Like Bill Clinton, the former president, Huckabee comes from the small town of Hope, Arkansas. He jokingly urges Clinton-hating Republicans to “give Hope a second chance”.

Huckabee has portrayed himself as a competent administrator with impeccable antiabortion credentials who nonetheless appealed to liberal voters with his education and healthcare programmes in Arkansas. Yet last week the focus was on his record of alleged ethical lapses. During his 14-year career as governor he became embroiled in 14 official investigations and was fined five times for breaches of state rules.

Most of the complaints against him concerned alleged infringements of rules on political campaign spending, notably when he failed to report that he had paid himself $14,000 to be his own media consultant in a 1992 campaign and did not disclose that he and his wife were the owners of a two-engine plane hired by his campaign for $43,000 in 1994. He was fined $1,000 by the state ethics commission.

In an online article entitled “The dark side of Mike Huckabee”, one of his former adversaries alleged that Huckabee “raked in tens of thousands of dollars in gifts, including gifts from people he later appointed to prestigious state commissions”.

The article by Max Brantley, editor of a Little Rock newspaper, claimed Huckabee had spent public money on a dog kennel, dry-cleaning, stockings for his wife and meals at a fast food restaurant. When he left office last January the governor also became embroiled in a row over a “wedding registry” set up for friends to help furnish his new home, even though he and his wife had been married for 34 years.

Asked to respond to the complaints, Huckabee shrugged them off as “pure nonsense” and part of the rough-and-tumble nature of Arkansas politics – something that Senator Hillary Clinton, front-runner for the Democratic nomination, knows plenty about. He also said that his experience of dirty politics made him “prepared for a presidential campaign . . . I don’t have a glass jaw”.

It was a measure of Huckabee’s creeping success that one of his rivals took a direct swing at him last week. Thompson, whose own campaign has failed to catch fire despite his Hollywood glamour, dismissed Huckabee as a “pro-life liberal” who was strong on abortion but weak on immigration and taxes. Huckabee’s critics have labelled him “tax-hike Mike” for his free-spending record in Arkansas.

Yet the polls indicate voters are unconvinced about Huckabee’s better known rivals. Despite spending millions on his Iowa campaign, Romney has seen his ratings slide and his hopes of delivering a double knockout blow by winning both Iowa and New Hampshire, next door to his home state, are in jeopardy.

Both Thompson and Senator John McCain are lagging in the states where they must perform well to build crucial momentum for the unprecedented blitz of more than 20 primaries that will be held on “Super Tuesday”, February 5.

That leaves Giuliani, who is focusing on Florida and other large states on the grounds that his appeal is more urban. Several commentators noted last week that Giuliani had the most to gain from a Huckabee upset in Iowa as Romney would be robbed of a double victory going into what has become known as “Super Duper Tuesday”.

The main obstacle for Huckabee, apart from the sleuths sniffing around his Arkansas past, is his lack of campaign funds and full-time staff to carry him into the February primaries.

He has so far raised little more than $2m, roughly what Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama collect from their Democrat supporters in a weekend.

Speculation is mounting that if he helps Giuliani by knocking out Romney, Giuliani might eventually repay the favour and bolster his shaky standing among conservatives by making Huckabee his vice-presidential running mate. However, Huckabee is not ready to yield the bigger prize yet. He insisted last week that presidential campaigns were “about momentum – and if you have the momentum, you’ll get the money”.

If he wins Iowa he will turn his attention to the early voting states such as South Carolina, Nevada and Michigan, where a strong turnout by conservative voters might pull off a surprise.

“For the past 11 months everybody’s been writing my political obituary each month, saying ‘He can’t go on, he doesn’t have enough money’,” Huckabee said. “And here I am tied for the lead in Iowa.”

Hi, I’m Rummy, the doll that talks gibberish

Just when America thought it had heard the last of Donald Rumsfeld’s tangled syntax, the former US defence secretary has returned in the shape of a battery-operated talking doll for Christmas.

The 12in action figure is dressed in a black pinstripe suit and at the press of a button can be made to recite 28 separate audio clips from Rumsfeld’s wartime Pentagon news briefings. The Washington Post hailed the $19.95 doll as the perfect solution for “Rummy nostalgia” – a condition apparently suffered by countless Washington insiders who can no longer mock the former secretary’s notoriously convoluted responses to simple questions about the war.

The clips include what many regard as his finest oratorical moment. “There are known knowns, there are things that we know that we know,” Rumsfeld once said. “There are known unknowns, that is to say there are things that we now know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns, there are things we do not know we don’t know, and each year we discover a few more of those unknown unknowns.”

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