Question: Your party is calling for the resignation of Sir Ian Blair over the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes. What is the government's role and responsibility in that?

Chris Huhne: The key issue in terms of responsibility is what level was the decision taken and whether ministers were involved.

If this was indeed an operational matter and Sir Ian was the person who was informed about what was going on, then it is appropriate that is where the resignation should be rather than ministerial level and I don't know of any evidence that it did go any higher.

Question: Trevor Philips seemed to endorse the tone that David Cameron is taking on the immigration debate. But do you think that saying "we need to have a grown-up debate" really changes the Conservative position?

Chris Huhne: The Conservatives have got to be very careful because of their track record over many decades of leading Tories sending out dog-whistle messages on this which have an altogether more unpleasant, sinister and surreptitious meaning than the apparent surface gloss of the words. I hope David Cameron is very careful.

I happen to think that we do need to reopen the immigration debate and talk very firmly about the need to protect parts of our communities in the UK who are being asked to go through very rapid change because of immigration.

Locally to me in south Hampshire and Southampton we have seen truly dramatic impacts on skilled wage rates in the building trade because of very sudden immigration of people with those skills.

We can only ask people to go through so much change at any given time. I'm not against change but we do have to mind the pace of change and the job security of people in our existing communities.

It is right to talk about tough immigration controls and it is right, for example, that we continue to cherish free movement in the European Union because so many of my constituents benefit from retiring to sunnier countries like Spain and Portugal, but we also have to step back and consider whether there are particular acute short-term effects on people in the UK, and if there are, we have to be tougher on non-EU immigration.

Huhne on the leadership

Question: Whoever wins the Liberal Democrat leadership contest, should there be a period of stability after a quick succession of leaders?

Chris Huhne: There is not going to be a period of stability, there is going to be a period of enormous energy because both Nick and I are committed to working with each other whatever the outcome.

We are committed to making sure we are working together as a team firing on all cylinders so that in the run up to the general election no one is in any doubt about what the Liberal Democrats stand for.

That is a fairer society and a greener society where we are handing back power to the communities of Britain in what is a ludicrously over-centralised state.

It is not a question of stability, what I want is a dynamic, energetic campaign to reconnect the Liberal Democrats with the half of the population who say they are liberal but who are not currently voting for us.

Question: You have mentioned a 'Camelot obsession' and said you are not a Cameron double which some people have taken as tacit criticism of Nick Clegg - does he have the experience to lead?

Chris Huhne: You must ask those questions to Nick not to me. I'm here to make a positive case for my candidacy.

One of the things I can bring to this leadership race is the fact that I spent years building up a business employing people; I spent 19 years as a financial journalist winning the financial journalist of the year award, writing a column for 10 years.

Therefore I know I will be very comfortable on the key issues over the next few years as the housing market turns down, we lose the feel-good factor.

I believe we will be looking at a delayed election probably no sooner than June 2010. In that environment one of the things we have to take on, dissect and deconstruct is Gordon Brown's record on the economy.

He was good on the independence of the Bank of England, he deserves praise for that but he has been absolutely lousy on so much else.

He has destroyed the private pensions scheme; he has messed up the private finance schemes for things like the London Underground; enormously complicated the tax system creating two kilograms of dead-weight paper which the self-employed and business people have to struggle through.

Gordon Brown is the patron saint of tax accountants and we need to be much clearer about the way we are opposing what this government has done to complicate and intrude into people's lives in ways that should have never have happened.

Question: That sounded like more of a pitch for Vince Cable's job as Treasury spokesman than for the leadership?

Chris Huhne: I think you have got to get the message across at the leadership level - after all, Gordon Brown has been chancellor responsible for this, he is now the prime minister and he wants to defend his record on economic stability so the leader needs to be able to take him on on his home turf.

So we need a leader who can take on not just David Cameron, who in many ways is frankly much easier because he has only spent four years in the real world outside the Westminster bubble.

We have to take votes from both sides and come surging through the middle as we did for example in the 1974 election when far from being squeezed even though Labour and the Tories were very close, we built up very strongly and took from both sides.

Huhne on Parliament

Question: What would you do to up the performance of the Liberal Democrats at prime minister's questions should you become leader?

Chris Huhne: I don't think that PMQs is the be all and end all of political life. Frankly I think it's a bit of pantomime but obviously it is a right of passage and something you have to go through.

My experience as a journalist from sitting in press conferences quizzing ministers is that the questions that get the best answers are the short sharp ones - the longer question the easier it is to avoid. One of the things I would do is to keep it short and sharp and to the point.

Question: Given you have such a small majority wouldn't it be a risk to elect a leader in that position if the Conservatives decided to reverse your 'decapitation strategy'?

Chris Huhne: It would be astonishing, with us going up sharply in the polls and with the sort of prospects we have at the next election, to think that Eastleigh is not a seat we are likely to win.

If I was elected leader I hope, though I take nothing for granted, that I would get a lot of support in Eastleigh.

It is notable that in the television age, no party leader has ever lost their seat.

It is also notable that since David Cameron became leader, the Conservatives have lost half their council seats in Eastleigh and the Lib Dems have won the highest share of the vote there.

So although I don't take anything for granted, I am quietly confident.

Huhne on coalitions

Question: What would your redlines be if it came to joining a coalition with one or other of the other major parties?

Chris Huhne: If other parties want to talk about partnership politics, about going into a longer-term relationship, then they have to be on the wavelength that allows that to happen.

If you look at every other country in Europe bar none you find that you do have partnership politics because of election systems that are fairer, where every vote counts.

In our system you get tiny shifts of the vote which create casino-type effects on the different local parties.

We also need fixed-term parliaments - you can't have a prime minister deciding on a whim because it happens to be to the advantage of the prime minister in question.

Those moves seem to me to be necessary parts of changing the furniture if we are all genuinely interested in partnership politics.

Huhne on the Union

Question: Are the Conservatives putting the Union at risk with their policy of English votes on English laws?

Chris Huhne: The Conservatives are playing dangerous politics because they are taking one element of the constitutional arrangements that we have at the moment which is unsatisfactory and they are stressing that to the exclusion of everything else.

The truth is that there are a whole series of problems. There is an anomaly in that Scottish MPs can vote on English matters but English MPs cannot vote on Scottish matters.

As part of a settlement that will have to be sorted but I don't want to replace one anomaly with another which is what the Conservatives are proposing.

Another problem is that we continue to elect English MPs with such an unfair system that it virtually guarantees a Tory majority in England on a minority of the vote.