Despite not being a Lib Dem (who couldn’t tell?), I’m really excited at the prospect of the party’s leadership contest. Since Charles Kennedy dismissed the idea of returning to his old drinking hole, and the likes of Vincent Cable and David Laws ruled themselves out of running, it’s looked more and more like a two-horse race between the ever-stronger Nick Clegg and the ever-weaker Chris Huhne.

Both of these contestants are the new breed of Lib Dems that reject the social democratic premise upon which all the party’s election campaigns (and those of the Liberal-SDP Alliance) were fought. They were both contributors to the Orange Book, subtitled ‘Regaining Liberalism’, which is dedicated to espousing market solutions to the problems traditionally addressed by social democrats with unlimited and unjustified state interventionism.

The Orange Bookers, led by David Laws (the co-editor) and also including the likes of Cable, have flanked the leading Tories, who are afraid to speak against the socialist post-war consensus, and have sat themselves at the vanguard of classical liberalism in this country. Another notable author is Mark Oaten, who… well, the jokes write themselves.

I’m always irked by people that call the Lib Dems ‘the Liberals’, when they’re anything but. It’s been so long since the old Liberal Party was assassinated - 101 years since Herbert Asquith began the socialist reforms in a failed attempt to ward off the Labour Party - that we often forget what it’s like to have a party in this country that puts the ideas of liberalism, of liberty itself, ahead of all others. The Conservatives throw a lot of rhetoric in that direction, but little of it sticks in the form of policy, except when it comes to some details on tax.

If front-runner Clegg wins the leadership election, he will have the mandate to push forward a modernisation programme based entirely upon the Orange Book, with fellow Orange Book conspirator Vincent Cable remaining as Treasury spokesperson. His campaign launch in Sheffield Hallam was filled with the rhetoric and vision of an individualist, and signposted a ‘tough’ programme of reform to take the party out of its ‘comfort zone’ and to regain the mantle of liberalism.

By marrying the economic liberalism underpinning the Orange Book movement with the social liberalism traditonally associated with the Liberal Democrats, and coordinated with an intellectual consistency so clearly lacking in any Liberal Democrat policy to date, there may finally be a party in the United Kingdom worth calling a Liberal Party.