Nick Clegg is paying the price for being king of compromise
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Version 0 of 1. The Liberal Democrat party is looking this week like the Glasgow school of art. Ruined by fire, its charred remains are picked over by firefighters while onlookers weep in despair. Could any of the great Victorian masterpiece be salvaged? And who is that, staggering from the smoking ruins? It is Nick Clegg, his face streaked with mud and misery, muttering "totally gutted" to no one in particular. I heard a party supporter telling the BBC that dropping Clegg as leader would be "terribly unfair". It was a very Lib Dem remark. Politics is about winning, not being fair. It is possible that a fresh face might garner a few more votes in 2015, but Vince Cable's face is hardly fresh. British politics in the coming year is going to be unpleasant. If I were a Lib Dem I would stick with Mr Nice Guy. When, back in May 2010, Clegg achieved apotheosis in the televised election debates, I was sorry for him. This would be his finest hour. The resulting surge in Lib Dem support was sure to deliver a hung parliament and thrust him into a coalition trap, where he would suffer a classic third party squeeze. The best that Clegg could hope for would be to "moderate" a Conservative government and pray that voters would say thank you. It was a faint hope. Better advice for the Lib Dems in 2010 would have been to stay outside David Cameron's government, with a Commons pact to support him where appropriate but explicitly to vote against unpalatable measures. Clegg could then decide when and on what issue to call a vote of no confidence and trigger another election. As it was, Cameron played a blinder that afternoon in the Downing Street rose garden. Clegg looked like the cat that had swallowed the cream, the first Liberal leader to take high office in half a century. But Clegg was the cream and Cameron the swallower. The Lib Dems have had a predictably awful time, "in office but not in power". Clegg has cut an isolated, ineffectual figure in the non-job of Cameron's deputy, a bit like an American vice-president. Most disappointing have been the items on which he claims to have moderated policy, not so much from "liberal values" as from soft Labour ones, mostly the spending of money. They include winning on pupil premiums, school meals and housing benefit, and losing on tuition fees, mansion tax and Lords reform. The Lib Dems have found no distinctively "liberal" voice. There has been no pressure for libertarian reform, such as on drugs, penal policy or official secrecy, no opposition to wars or cuts to defence, no "small is beautiful". The party in coalition has shown scant sympathy for local democracy or local planning. It has gone along with Tory hostility to the countryside. Clegg has appeared like the leader of a bunch of closet Blairites, left behind in a Downing Street attic. As their president Tim Farron admits, they have suffered "loss of identity" in the coalition. Last week's disaster, however, saw the Lib Dems garner just 6.9% of votes, placed fifth behind even the Greens. This must be put down to Clegg's evangelical faith in the EU. It stripped him of all plausibility in the increasingly sceptical debate about Europe. To go into the election so publicly "for" what the majority were so publicly "against" was suicide. The Lib Dems would have been wiser to have championed the new European co-operation that must somehow emerge from last week's orgy of scepticism. Instead they fell silent and have now let Cameron seize that opportunity. Clegg and his party's uncritical pro-Europeans have fallen into precisely the trap described a decade ago by Larry Siedentop in his prescient Democracy in Europe. An ardent European, he warned that too ardent a pursuit of "ever closer union" as a historical inevitability would end in a crash. The union's bureaucratic centralism would threaten "diversity in Europe", a diversity rooted in the continent's history and culture. That in turn would evoke "a threat to political moderation", from nationalist extremism. That is exactly what has come to pass. Could Clegg not see he would become the enemy of constructive union rather than its friend? Yet none of this might matter. Centre parties are always squeezed, and their policies always scavenged from their rivals. Except where they have some regional or tribal identity, they are for outsiders, dustbins for the disgruntled, parties for "none of the above". Their ruling cliques enjoy such power as is granted not by millions of votes but by the chance arithmetic of an assembly or parliament. They have no mandate for anything. That is why Clegg is by no means dead. Last week's poll results were essentially a plebiscite on Europe and a roar of anger against conventional politics. It is most unlikely that Ukip's performance will be reflected in first-past-the-post seats at a general election, whatever the psephologists say. Clegg may have been badly mugged by Ukip's thugs. But if the electors of Sheffield are kind, he will be back in the Commons, where his fate will depend as before on the balance between the two big parties. If it is close, even a shrivelled handful of Lib Dem MPs will enable him to again wield that brief delicious moment of glory, as the man who chooses the man who rules the nation. Clegg will again have to decide whether to continue his loveless marriage with Cameron or skip into bed with Ed Miliband. It is probable that his party would be happier with the latter. Whether Miliband would demand Clegg step down as the price of admission, who knows, but he would be foolish to do so. The survival of the present coalition through such turbulent times has been a phenomenon that few predicted, a testament to the maturity of Tories and Lib Dems alike. Clegg has proved a loyal aide to Cameron, modest in defeat, dignified in humiliation. There is no reason why he should not offer the same service to Miliband. If I were Clegg I would have no truck with either. He should let a minority government struggle on, giving each measure thumbs up or thumbs down on its merits. The relentless compromises of office should be plain for the voters to see. I suspect Lib Dem voters would prefer it that way, and revert to being a centrist party of bland protest. For Clegg it means no more limousines and red boxes, but at least he would be free of red eyes and sagging jaws. |