What hope for a lovely whale like Ming in a sea of political sharks?

Quite the reverse, he feels that he is met by interest and appropriate levels of intelligent enthusiasm wherever he goes.The point being that there are 73,000 potential voters in this leadership election, no one of whose vote is worth more than any other’s, and most of those haven’t attended any hustings or meetings. “A lot of this,” Ming says, “is happening below the radar.”

No one really knows what’s happening, but he’s got 58 per cent of the parliamentary party behind him, and — contrary to some predictions — no one in the country is raising with him the question of his role in the assassination of Charlie K. Ming concludes that “we are entitled to be optimistic”.

Let’s say he does win. Would he be the right man to take the Lib Dems forward in the era of David Cameron and the new, exciting, mutating Conservative Party. Is he dynamic enough? What has he actually achieved, for all his seniority?

Questions like this cause Ming Campbell visible pain. I am inviting him to blow his own trumpet, and he doesn’t like it. “Apart from the (former) leader and Alan Beith, I am the only Privy Counsellor from my party,” he announces. “Why do you think the Prime Minister chose me?” I have no idea, but I imagine it’s because he is steady, experienced and reliable enough to do whatever Privy Counsellors do. He winces. “I hate all this immodesty. It sits very uneasily upon me.”

It does, but arguably it shouldn’t. Reticence has never really been a part of a successful leader’s armoury. Imagine Mrs T telling the Tories that it wasn’t that important whether she personally turned or not, or Tony Blair arguing that his ambition was to make British education quite good.

Ming reads these thoughts. His party, he insists, should be one of “energy, judgment and values — all of which I possess . . . I am not the cautious or consolidating candidate. Far from it.” He’s dynamic, decisive, and eschews the technocratic consensus of the other political formations.

“There’s no room for a third managerial party in British politics,” he says. His will be a party of ideology and principle.

I haven’t mentioned the youth thing, though it has to be said that Ming, for all his tailoring, looks his age. It isn’t necessary. He is ready with a picture of a life under Ming in which “the energies” of young Lib Dems are released. “You can’t fulfil your potential,” he says, “unless you have experience behind you.” This creates the image of a sort of Lib Dem de Medici court. Under the wise duke’s patronage, the buds of a Liberal Democratic renaissance will burst into full flower. Round the table they will gather: Leonardo de Clegg, Botticable, Oatavaggio.

It’s fetching, but it’s been said by several commentators that the plan is for Ming to serve two or three years, tide the party over, allow the young artists to paint their first can- vases and experiment with their first helicopters, and then to stand aside allowing one of them to out-Cameron Cameron just in time for the next election. Some have dubbed it the Clegg-through-Ming strategy. What does he think of that? “My reply,” he replies, “is monosyllabic and plural”.

This is a joke I don’t get. Is that a plural monosyllable, as in “socks”? Or one syllable followed by a plural, as in “one, two”? Or, “I, we”? Or, “I wee”? Is it, “I wee on the idea of standing down for Nick Clegg?” Fortunately Ming continues, with gusto: “There is no compact of any kind, implied or explicit. I will serve, if elected, through the whole of this Parliament — which could last till 2010 — and then offer myself for re-election, as our constitution requires — after the general election.” He couldn’t be clearer. The young cardinals, he adds, “should not be making their reservations for Rome”.

OK. If he gets in, he stays. What dynamic stuff will he look to do, say, on tax? He enumerates five principles, two of which are generally seen as being in contradiction to each other. He’ll take the poorest out of income tax altogether. He’ll use tax policy to encourage good environmental practice. He wants to see proper funding for public services. He wants also to encourage opportunity and not to stifle ambition (usually code for cutting tax) and he wants taxation to be “ redistributive“ (usually code for raising tax).

He thinks we’re paying enough tax as it is and we’re spending enough as it is. If only we spent it better by, for example, abolishing the DTI.

This is fairly standard Lib Dem stuff. What about the very controversial idea of a local income tax? Does he still want to abolish Britain’s only property tax? He reminds me that Botticable’s looking into it right now, but tells me he doesn’t have “an invincible repugnance about a property tax”.

A what? “An invincible repugnance. It’s a legal phrase.” That’s Ming for you. If Boris Johnson had said that, you’d have seen it as part of his jocular self-image. When Ming uses it, there’s no joke, and it becomes like his clothes — simultaneously well-cut and somehow anachronistic. It was like when he was confronted on the need for greenery and gave up his beloved Jag on air. He doesn’t quite get it.

Isn’t the truth of it that he is a sort of Willie Whitelaw — a very clever, likeable politician who doesn’t quite have what it takes to be a modern party leader, but is likely to be a massive asset to anyone else who is the leader? Ming goes into an almost musical riff. “I did not win my seat after 11 years, 50,000 miles and three elections, or acquire a successful practice at the bar, nor run in the Olympics, by not being a competitor!”

Ming is lovely in a way the top politicians aren’t. Look at Tony’s eyes or David’s teeth, or the way Gordon moves. They are sharks. Ming is a whale. It would be better for him to stay in the ocean than to swim up the estuary to where all the people are, and where whales die.

Curriculum vitae

Born Glasgow, May 22, 1941

Education Hillhead High School, Glasgow; Glasgow University (studying law); Stanford University, USA

Career Called to Scottish Bar 1968; appointed Queen’s Counsel 1982

Interests Sprinter; ran in 1964 Olympic Games, held British 100 metres record 1967-74

Family Married Elspeth Urquhart 1970

Politics Contested Greenock and Port Glasgow in February and October 1974; North East Fife 1979 and 1983; MP for North East Fife since 1987

Front bench Liberal spokesman on arts and sport 1987-88, Lib Dems spokesman on arts and sport in 1988, defence 1988-94, foreign affairs since 1994

Party posts Chairman, Scottish Liberal Party 1975-77; deputy leader, Lib Dems since 2003; acting leader since January

Honours Appointed CBE 1987; Privy Counsellor 1999; knighted 2004

Best-known phrase “We were taken to war in a flawed prospectus”