Who has been the best Lib Dem leader?

It's not quite up there with winning one of Willy Wonka's Golden Tickets but the results of the latest Liberal Democrat Newswire survey are in showing who is rated as the best leader of the Liberal Democrats.

Before giving you the results from the votes of nearly 1,000 people, a short pair of digressions about Vince Cable and Henry Campbell-Bannerman. Some people complained about the absence of Vince from the survey, to which my instinctive reaction is "Seriously: you think you can rate how well or badly a party leader has done after less than six months and no big elections?". It's also my more considered reaction too. I'm baffled that people think he'd be a sensible option to include. But a fair number of people queried his absence, so if you think you've got a good reason why he'd be reasonable to judge so soon in, do say.

Then there were those who complained that a survey about leaders of the Liberal Democrats didn't include leaders of the previous Liberal Party. Being a fan of the under-appreciated Henry Campbell-Bannerman myself I can sympathise with people who wanted to put him (or perhaps more commonly, Jo Grimmond) up at the top of their list. The reason for their exclusion? There's already a growing chunk of party members who weren't even born when Paddy Ashdown gave up the Lib Dem leadership. Even the list of only Lib Dem leaders is already going further back in time than many members have political knowledge of (an interesting challenge for the party's internal culture, by the way).

But with that out of the way, here are the results of people's first preferences:

40% Charles Kennedy
29% Nick Clegg
25% Paddy Ashdown
3% David Steel
2% Tim Farron
1% Ming Campbell
<1% Bob Maclennan

An AV count has Kennedy beating Clegg with just under 60% of the vote in the final round. His support didn't vary much around the country - he was slightly more popular in Scotland and slightly less popular with newer members (or more precisely, the newer the member the more popular Nick Cleg was in the poll).

I was, however, struck by not only the low score for Tim Farron but also the paucity of comments such as 'he'd have been a great leader if only he'd have had longer'. As one of my previous surveys of party members only showed, although Tim Farron was extremely popular during his time as leader, first events of the general election and then the post-election perspective has seen a large majority of party members move on to thinking that his departure was the right outcome.