There’s some quite heated debate going on about whether Huhne is attempting to ’smear’ Clegg by alleging that he is supporting unpopular policies which he is in fact not advocating.

So here’s the evidence, so you can decide for yourself if you think that’s what’s going on.

The facts are:

1. Chris Huhne has claimed in a number of places that Nick Clegg supports an education voucher system. For example in last week’s email from the candidates to party members, he said:

I’ve already made plain that I don’t go along with those Lib Dem MPs who propose American-style school vouchers or replacing the NHS with privatised health insurance. I offer a positive message for Liberal Democrats on schools and hospitals: returning power from central government to local control. It is just wrong that the first person with elected accountability for our hospitals is the Secretary of State - Alan Johnson.

Although he does not name Clegg, the argument runs that in a leadership election in which there is only one other candidate, and that candidate has indeed been talking about schools funding, it’s pretty obvious who is being referred to.

2. To support their claim Huhne’s team have produced two newspaper articles which say Clegg is supporting education vouchers.

3. Clegg has vehemently denied that he supports vouchers, for example in the education section of his website, with the phrase “This isn’t a “voucher” system, by any stretch of the imagination.” His piece there explains what it is that he is in fact proposing, and how it is different from vouchers.

His campaign say that he had no control over what journalists write about him, and the explanation is that they simply did not understand the details of the proposal he was in fact making (which was to support the ‘pupil premium’ which is established party policy). I have heard (though am not personally able to confirm) that when pressed both journalists have admitted that Clegg did not ever use the word ‘vouchers’, which might be thought to be relevant here. There also do not appear to be any instances in the material made available by Clegg and his team of him supporting vouchers.

So there are the facts - you can make up your own mind about what you think the truth is!

My own view?

Well it seems to me clear that Chris Huhne is deliberately trying to associate Clegg with a policy that he thinks will be unpopular with Lib Dem members and activists (there is a reason why no Lib Dems are actually promoting this idea!). He is very well aware of Nick’s actual position, and is using the confusion created by a couple of journalists (NB: people who do not always have the best interests of the Liberal Democrats at heart!) to stir this up.

The claim about “replacing the NHS with privatised health insurance” is also highly misleading. What Clegg has said about health is not remotely close to shutting down the NHS, which Huhne’s statement clearly implies. If we are going to get catty about this then we could say that Huhne himself is proposing to “break up the NHS” (by stopping it being a national system and making it much more locally accountable). But that is equally a distortion of Huhne’s commitment to locally accountable health services (a commitment which long-standing readers of this blog will know that as it happens I enthusiastically share).

What Clegg did say (in his National Liberal Club speech a couple of weeks ago) is that we should learn from what has been done “in Scandinavia and other parts of Europe” - but specifically that “our universal public services must be free to use and accessible to all”.

This issue isn’t the first complaint that’s been made about Huhne attacking Clegg - first there was the “we don’t need Cameron’s stunt double” fuss, and then the attack on Clegg from Chris Clarke on behalf of the Huhne campaign (so controversial it was subsequently withdrawn).

I quite accept that I’m not neutral in this - I’m a declared Cleggie, and if anyone didn’t know that until now (despite the large ”Supporting Nick Clegg for Leader” button at the top of my site!) then they ought to know that. I respect Chris a lot, he has done a for this party over many many years and will do a lot more - and I personally share a lot of his particular personal policy enthusiasms. But I just think that Nick will be the better leader for our party.

Sure, all’s fair in love, war and leadership elections. But I’m sorry that one candidate in this internal election is resorting to trying to win votes by disagreeing not with the other candidate’s views, but with a deliberately false interpretation of what his views are, to try and associate him with views that he does not hold, and that he knows are unpopular within the party.