Who will it be?
Ming, Chris or Simon? Nobody knows.
All the talk about who's the bookies' favourite to win the Lib Dem leadership race merely proves it. Bookies, remember, are not soothsayers. Their odds merely reflect their exposure to financial risk. They respond to the bets of punters. The sure way to make your guy the favourite is to bet on him. The widespread suspicion at Westminster is that that's just what friends of Chris Huhne have been doing.
Pollsters can't help us much either with this select and special bunch of voters (there are around 73,000 Lib Dem members). Conventional polling struggles to get more than one or two Lib Dem members in a normal sample. Internet polling - which showed a surge for Chris Huhne - performed well in the Tory contest, but there are still doubts about the reliability of samples in contests of this sort.
Finally, we have the Lib Dems to thank for not being able to predict the winner. They passed a rule so that membership information was private. No candidate has a canvassing list so even they don't know.
My hunch is it'll be Ming. The official result will be at three o'clock, but the talk is that we should hear a whisper around lunchtime… keep an eye open.
I'm 
