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Sunday 27 May 2012

The elevation of Nick Clegg shows we’ve reached a new low

It doesn’t matter what the Lib Dem leader stands for, says Rod Liddle. In the era of X Factor politics, people can decide, on a whim, that he should be Prime Minister

Is Nick Clegg better than Winston Churchill, as a recent opinion poll seemed to suggest? The obvious answer is yes, of course — because Nick is still alive. Winston Churchill died in 1965 and I have the silver commemorative crown coin to prove it, and a very vague memory of standing somewhere crowded in central London with my mum and dad, watching his large coffin being loaded onto some riverboat.

But that is the only area, so far as I can see, where Nick has the edge over Winnie — i.e., he hasn’t yet entirely decomposed. Maybe in 50 years’ time crowds, bereft with grief, will line the streets for the death of Nick Clegg — and in Llantrisant they will begin to fashion his image upon silver coins. Hell, who knows. Winnie was a Liberal once, of course; anything can happen. I don’t know that he was ever quite so bright-eyed and vacant as Nick Clegg, but then the way we value such attributes changes as the years go by.

Bright-eyed and vacant is quite au courant these days, easily on a par with resolute, principled and intelligent; Nick may look and speak like the sort of pretty public schoolboy who has just given up his job in the City to ‘realise his dream’ and reach the semi-finals of Masterchef, where his Moroccan pan-fried lamb on white bean puree just failed to convince the judges. But the problem is, though, people like that sort of stunted and weird ambition these days and I suppose that is not Mr Clegg’s fault.

The elevation of Clegg, you would hope, marks the apogee of the cretinisation of the British electorate, in which the public debate is now pitched at a slightly lower level than that implied in the sorts of questions I used to be asked by my two sons: ‘Dad, what would win in a fight between a tiger and a shark? What would win in a fight between a table and a desk?’ It cannot surely drop lower than this, can it? Clegg’s sole pitch, the only thing which scored him points — ‘at least I’m not them’ — was, nonetheless both accurate and had force. It would have had no less force if it had been issued by a gently cooling bowl of oxtail soup on a plinth, either, and would undoubtedly have contained more substance.

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