The crunch for the knitted yoghurt-fanciers

The political blogs are in their element after the second LibDem regicide in two years. Did Ming Campbell jump? Was he pushed? Which Young Turk will now become top sandal? Will all the contenders for the leadership fit into a taxi? Are there any LibDems who are not contenders for the leadership? Is Nick Clegg unstoppable? Who is Nick Clegg?

Ming Campbell may not have helped himself by seeming to belong to a different era, but the LibDem crisis will not be solved by a new leader. Their problem is that they are simply monumentally irrelevant to the life of the nation, other than acting as a handy repository for protest votes that otherwise have no home. Can anyone say what they stand for that is distinctive in British public life? Precisely. They have made themselves irrelevant by positioning themselves on the left of the Labour party: anti-America, anti-Iraq war, anti-Israel, anti-family, anti-capitalism, pro-green fundamentalism, pro-drugs, pro-victim culture, pro-big state. They do well therefore on the metropolitan dinner-party circuit but not so well where anyone has a passing relationship with reality.

In that happy state, their clothes were nicked by the Cameroons who, eyeing the disaffected people-carrier vote, repositioned the Tory party as pro-green, pro-big state, pro-criminal, pro-drugs, anti-American etc. This worked a treat. Tories went up; LibDems went down. Then Gordon Brown decided to be a cross-dresser too. So he nicked the Tories’ old clothes that they had thrown onto the trash and posed as anti-immigration, anti-crime, anti-gambling and anti-drugs. Labour went up; Tories went down.

So then the Tories pulled some of their old clothes out of the trash can and said they would uphold marriage, all but axe inheritance tax, tighten immigration and fight the EU constitution. Whereupon they shot up in the polls and the LibDems fell to bits. Either the people-carrier classes don’t like the taxman snaffling their children’s inheritance (who’da thunk it, they’re not so daft after all) or — just as likely — they are natural wet conservatives, who defected to the LibDems only because of the Rocky Horror Show cast who ran the Tory party before, and now feel it’s safe to return because Cameron and Brown between them have decontaminated the conservative agenda.

So now we have a Labour party that stands for redistribution and responsibility and a Conservative party that stands for responsibility and redistribution. And so what do the LibDems now have to offer that Labour and the Tories have omitted to triangulate? Er…

The one specific area that is ripe for exploitation is the public services — the most glaring inconsistency in the Cameron agenda which promises both power to the consumer and maintaining the current level of state spending on health and education — where Nick Clegg appears to have genuinely radical decentralising views which in themselves are welcome. However, if he is elected the LibDems promise to become merely a consistently libertarian party in both economics and moral values, which the UK needs like a hole in the head. The gap in the political market is a party that will defend British and western liberal democratic values from the onslaught mounted on them by the combination of Euro-federalism and the Islamic jihad from without and by libertarianism and cultural Marxism from within.

That means reaching into the tradition of British liberalism itself and reclaiming its authentic values as a moral project rooted in Judeo-Christian values from the left that hijacked them and twisted them into their antithesis. They are indeed within the Liberals’ own tradition. So will the LibDems make themselves relevant again by reasserting these values and saving the nation?