Over the last year Lembit Opik MP and Baroness (Ros) Scott have been running campaigns for the election which has now finally formally started, to be the next President of the Liberal Democrats.

But the campaigns they have been running have been so different that it really feels more like they have been standing in different elections.

Ros stole a march at autumn conference last year by having her team hand out “I’m 4 Ros” badges before anyone had even really realised there was a presidential election coming up (at that point we didn’t know that we’d have another leadership election to get through before this one!). And she’s spent the year since getting widely around the party, travelling all around the country speaking at regional conference and local party events, starting her own blog and a Facebook group with more than 300 members, writing articles in party publications, and generally getting herself seen as much as possible around the party. I’d say it was a classic good internal party election campaign, and very effectively run by Ros and the man she’s married this year, “party bureaucrat” (his words!) Mark Valladares. CORRECTION: A number of people have been in touch to point out that Ros’ campaign team is in fact this group. Apologies. Anyway, I congratulate them on it!

Lembit’s campaign, on other hand, at least as far as it’s reached my attention, has mostly comprised telling some journalists that he’s planning to stand for the post, resulting in one or two pieces like a full (but not very flattering) profile in the Observer a couple of months ago - combined with his usual round of activities in the party, in his spokesman and Welsh roles, as well of course as his celebrity activities, concluding in the end with the break-up of his engagement to a former Cheeky Girl.

Most people’s view is that of the two, Ros has really done the work to ‘earn’ winning this role.

However the conventional wisdom is that Lembit would probably win a contested election. Most voters in this election, “armchair” Lib Dem members, get most of their information about the party through the mainstream media, where Lembit’s profile is clearly far higher. In my experience, voters in this kind of election tend to be quite star struck, and vote for someone they’ve actually heard of before, and think is making an impact on non-Lib Dem members, over someone with an otherwise much stronger claim that they simply don’t think is “famous”.

And a significant further supporting point for Lembit is that he has run before. A friend who was involved in Lembit’s campaign in the last Presidential election, in 2004, makes the point that Simon Hughes had a significant advantage then because his team had had experience of running a campaign in an all-member ballot before (the 1999 Leadership election) and so at a sheer practical level had a much clearer idea of what they needed to do to win. This rings true with me, and I think is also supported by the experience of the Hughes campaign in the 2006 leadership election (it wasn’t practical organisational aspects which torpedoed it), and especially by the Huhne leadership campaigns in 2006 and 2007, which was certainly in a wholly different organisational league to the Clegg leadership campaign.

So all of this supports the idea that Lembit would be likely to win a contested election.

And many may say that this isn’t a problem: this is how it is supposed to work - the candidate running the most effective campaign wins.

The problem is that I know almost no significant party figure who supports the idea of Lembit being President of the party. Precisely the celebrity activities which mean that many party members think he has a profile outside the party, mean that other party figures do not want to see him as party President. A little of this may be a degree of envy and resentment, particularly from his Parliamentary colleagues - and indeed it is quite understandable if you have, say, spent months coming up with proposals to improve people’s lives through a particular policy initiative, to see repeatedly that the public care more about the ins and outs of Lembit’s love life than they do of your policy.

But mostly I think it is that most senior and serious party figures do not really want to see the role of being President of the party becoming just another part of the Lembit Celebrity Show. The Presidency is not the most important role within the party, but it is neither entirely insignificant, and people do want to see it treated with some seriousness. And a lot of people, frankly, have for the moment just had enough of Lembit. As some famous politician once famously said to another (I forget the identities of the characters but I’m sure someone will be along soon to fill them in the comments…) a lot of people’s attitude to Lembit at the moment is that “a period of silence from you would be welcome”.

Is this unfair on Lembit? Some of his celebrity publicity - most obviously the break-up of his engagement - is clearly not his fault. And reading the Lib Dem blogs and talking to people, I do think that people do have genuine sympathy for him on this. Clearly this is not a happy time in anyone’s life and I think party colleagues recognise that.

But I thought one person on a Lib Dem forum put it well, by pointing out that Lembit has had to make a choice about whether to concentrate on his celebrity life, or his spokesmanships for the party. And it is quite clear what choice he has made. No-one forced him to appear regularly in Hello magazine, or any of the many other celebrity appearances he makes. And so having made that choice, Lembit now does have to live with the consequences of it.

The result is that I think Lembit actually taking over as President next January, would I think be pretty difficult for the party. I think people’s attitude towards him is that they think he’s a bit much, rather than actively hating him.

But if part of the role of being President is to motivate and lead, then I think the fact that there is an almost universal distinct lack of enthusiasm to work with him among those who would actually have to do so, would be quite a severe problem.

For example, following the rejection at conference earlier this year of an amendment to the constitution which would have seen the party’s Federal Executive (FE) elect its own chair, one of the President’s roles will continue to be chair the FE. Leading the FE to be an effective body doesn’t seem to be the easiest task at the best of times, and I don’t think would be any simpler if most of its members, as well as the other bodies that the President has to interact with on FE’s behalf, would rather the President weren’t there.

Would electing Lembit as President “split the party”? No, I think that’s going a bit far. But, given where people are now, I do think that the party in the country effectively imposing Lembit as President on people who actually have to work with the person in that role, would be highly divisive. And once settled into post, it wouldn’t necessarily get easier - see for example how uncomfortable many Welsh party members were with having the Leader of the Welsh Liberal Democrats having the celebrity profile that Lembit had.

An Opik presidency could present the party with quite a challenge.