Here's the second post on Saturday's Meeting the Challenge conference - this one's on the leadership candidates' speeches.

There were all four very different.

• Ming gave a leader's speech, not a candidate's speech. It was thin on detail but heavy on gravitas. He was visibly distracted by the way his microphone kept randomly failing, but he still sounded like a leader ought to. Of course, if you had unanswered questions about his policy proposals you were out of luck.
• Simon spoke with all his usual passion and none of his usual verbal incontinence. He challenged a central plank of party theory - that liberty is more important than equality - and he talked directly to party members. If you agree with him it was stunning - if you don't, there was nothing there for you.
• Chris Huhne was starting with a blank slate, as most people don't know him. An unexciting speaker, he chose to fill it with a strange emphasis on the global environment and, for half the speech, nothing else. By the end he'd said enough about other things to avoid sounding like a single-issue candidate - but only just.
• Mark Oaten strode on stage and for a while ignored the podium. Unfortunately, he doesn't quite have the physical presence to carry that off. He sounded brilliant until after a while you heard the phrase "21st century liberalism" one time too many and realised he was actually talking complete waffle.

I'm still not totally sure how I'm voting. I was able to rule out Oaten, as he was useless; Huhne, as he was too one-dimensional; and Hughes, as I didn't agree with him (although he pretty much totally repaired the damage that he'd done to his reputation in my eyes over the last few years - I'm a fan again, I just have a different view on freedom vs equality). I wasn't sure about Campbell, and I'm still not. I was able to talk to him for a while during one of the coffee breaks and he was very honest in answering some pretty blunt questions that I asked him about his conduct during the removal of Charles Kennedy. He's good - but I may still write in Kennedy's name.

As to the overall prospects, as I wrote earlier in a comment on Guido's blog, I think Oaten's dead in the water but doesn't know it yet, Huhne's going to have a respectable showing but not trouble the winners, and Ming's still the narrowest of favourites ahead of a very confident-looking Hughes.

Anyway, here are abridged versions of all the candidates' speeches (with dodgy photos of them in action). Any errors are down to my shorthand, for which I apologise. Do not treat anything in them as a direct word-for-word quote (although some bits are) as they are all heavily compressed.