Nevermind #getkenontwitter, #getkenarealcabinetpost

In case you missed it last night, please postpone reading this post until after you’ve had a chance to watch last night’s Question Time. Go on. This will still be here when you get back.

So you can tell me what you think in the comments, but as this is my blog I’m going to share my thoughts first.

And right in at number one: Shappi Khorsandi. Oh dear me. Not a good performance. Mind you, typical of anyone who is unthinkingly and reflexively left-wing. She’s clearly regurgitating half-formed opinions, but you would hope that a comedienne would have the wits to, you know, stick to a common theme. And have some experience at not sounding like an idiot in front of a live audience. Oh, and whilst we’re dealing with the make-weights: Kelvin, your “digestive” line was terribly stilted. And everyone knows Gordon Brown is more of an oatcake man …

Let’s move on quickly to the main event: Hain, Huhne, and Ken. And Dimbleby’s tie, loud enough to have it’s own outsized personality, but not really contributing an awful lot.

Actually on reflection I don’t even want to talk about perma-tanned Peter. He’s still a smug git. He’s still orange. He still has a wonderful ability to come across as a real-life David Brent. So really anything I say would be the same as anything I’ve said before.

But Chris Huhne, on the other hand … I actually quite like Chris Huhne, and I think a large part of it is because he strikes me as a really unusual LibDem. He’s coherent; he has presence; he handles himself extremely well. But more to the point I think it’s because deep-down he’s a little bit of a Tory. I will always remember the conference after the LibDems had select Nick Clegg as their leader wondering why on earth they hadn’t selected Chris Huhne (who, if I remember correctly, also lost out to Menzies Campbell), until my brother pointed out that even the LibDem membership didn’t think the party mattered and that they had ditched Charlie Kennedy as soon as he started edging them towards electability. I’m going to save my thoughts on that for later though.

But let’s face it, good as Huhne was, there was only one clear winner: Ken.

Now I know that Ken’s position on Europe is not going to endear him to the worryingly nationalistic view David Cameron seems intent on adopting; but as the debate wore on, it became more and more obvious that this man is still one of the Conservatives’ greatest assets. He has authority but isn’t condescending. He has an excellent turn of phrase. His QC background — a welcome change from the frankly paper-weight qualifications of some of his shadow cabinet colleagues — gives him that precious ability to instinctively hit upon the salient point of an argument.

Take for example his comment about the “presidential prime minister”. Absolutely spot on.

What I don’t quite get is: why is he languishing in the second-tier of the shadow cabinet? He’s more than qualified to take on practically any position there is: one of my friends, a self-confessed Thatcherite and an economist, believes that in point of fact it was his Chancellorship which fueled the early-New-Labour-era prosperity, rather than anything Gordon Brown might lay claim to. He has at various times served as the Home Secretary, the Health Secretary and the Education Secretary. He’s probably forgotten more about the mechanics of government than the rest of the current Parliamentary Conservative Party ever knew. It’s frankly incredible that he wasn’t even in the Shadow Cabinet until Alan Duncan’s fall from grace.

Even if we accept that David Cameron erroneously feels that he can’t have Ken in a front-line role, he has to make better uses of this evergreen politician. The best-run companies understand and prize the value of institutional knowledge; Ken has vast experience both as a politician and as a senior adviser to many companies. Incidentally, I would rather MPs went down this route and declared their outside interests than submitted their entirely fictitious expense claims, but that’s for another post perhaps (and a certain Glaswegian Labour MP gets very touchy if you so much as think about expenses in their presence). Give him a large, strategic role in the party; a role which will make the most of his prodigious talents.

Finally, the man himself is just one of those people who you just know is a hero. He’s a member of CAMRA. He smokes the finest of fine cigars; he drinks the best of the best whiskies. He’s a keen follower of cricket and football. He’s a Jazz fan. He’s the sort of person who would be guaranteed to make any social event better. If he were on Twitter … well, he would be a dryer, suaver version of Stephen Fry; probably with the finest Tweets in the world. Just imagine it! He’s perfectly suited to it.

Incidentally he’s looking incredibly svelte these days too.

I think I might have just a little bit of a man-crush on him.