If this is the case, then Nick Clegg would do well to read Elizabeth Jenkins’s 1954 novel The Tortoise and the Hare. Achingly sad, but ultimately uplifting, this elegant book captures every minute detail of a brutally failing marriage.

Naive young Imogen is married to Evelyn, a domineering bully of a barrister. He speaks to her with a ‘faint, unconscious note of contempt’ in his voice that makes her ‘long wildly not only to be dead, but never to have been born’. And yet, while Imogen feels a ‘half-formed dread’ about their problems, she shies away from confronting them: ‘She dreaded to make the fatal movement that would bring down the avalanche.’

I’m sure Nick Clegg would sympathise with her hesitation, but both avalanches and failing marriages must at some point come crashing down. When Imogen — after many sleepless nights lying tearfully alone in the moonlight — at last agrees to give Evelyn a divorce, it comes as something of a relief rather than a terrible blow. Phew, thinks the reader, at least she’s faced it, done something rather than nothing, and now she can move on.

So the novel ends with the marriage over, and while it is sad to see that it has failed, the cloud has rather a substantial silver lining. Imogen gets her ‘room of one’s own’ when she moves into a lovely London flat with a ‘plain and graceful’ interior: ‘She had always loved and wanted rooms with just such elegance and simplicity.’ She finds that, now she’s not so eaten up by her ghastly marriage, she has masses of time to do whatever she wants, and looks for an occupation with the Women’s Voluntary Service (this was the Fifties, after all). The novel ends with Imogen saying to herself, determinedly, ‘I must improve … there is a very great deal to be done,’ a line which leaves us looking forward to the future rather than reaching wistfully back to the past or stagnating in the present.

Nick Clegg needs to follow Imogen’s example and face up to the miserable reality of his failing political marriage. The death throes are painful, but Elizabeth Jenkins assures us that once each party is allowed to go its separate way, the future will be more fulfilling. Of course there will be a lingering bitterness for the Lib Dems — this was their first time in power and they’ve messed it up — but Clegg should put this behind him and, like Imogen, look to the future. Indeed, he should make use of his new freedom to begin on the ‘very great deal to be done’ for the Lib Dems.

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Ladies, before you lace yourself in, think back to Scarlett O’Hara in Gone with the Wind. Near the beginning of this enormous novel, Scarlett, bent on seducing Ashley Wilkes, decides to wear a low-cut green muslin dress with a tiny 17-inch waist. Even loyal Mammy protests, ‘You kain show yo’ buzzum befo’ three o’clock.’ Sage advice.

But Scarlett is insistent and so, ‘Mammy pulled and jerked vigorously and, as the tiny circumference of whalebone-girdled waist grew smaller, a proud, fond look came into her eyes. “Ain’ nobody got a wais’ lak mah lamb,” she said approvingly,’ before forcing her to eat ‘two large yams covered with butter, a pile of buckwheat cakes dripping syrup, and a large slice of ham swimming in gravy’. It’s astonishing that there’s room inside Scarlett’s tiny waist for this huge meal, but, as it was deemed unladylike to eat anything at a barbecue, she needs to be full to her corset-sculpted brim before arriving. ‘Why is it a girl has to be so silly to catch a husband?’ she complains, crossly chomping through it.

But the fact of the matter is, however tight her corset, Scarlett is neither coyly feminine nor delicately ladylike. She makes a fool of herself at the fateful party, and only becomes a heroine when she takes on masculine roles. She keeps the family plantation going through the civil war, shoots dead a Yankee marauder, runs her husband’s business, and even buys and runs her own sawmill. Despairing of her hopeless second husband’s laxity with his finances, Scarlett reflects, ‘He’s got to make money, even if I’ve got to wear the pants in the family to make him do.’ When times get tough, corsets, at least figuratively speaking, are a thing of the past.

But for those of you who, unlike Scarlett, still long to wear the corset not the trousers, let me leave you with the remarks of the marvellous Lady Mary Wortley Montagu upon entering a bagnio in Adrianople in 1717. She describes how the Turkish ladies, happily lolling around ‘stark naked’, urged her to undress too. Then, ‘I was a[t] last forced to open my shirt, and show them my stays, which satisfied them very well, for I saw they believed I was so locked up in that machine, that it was not in my own power to open it, which contrivance they attributed to my husband.’

Do we really want to return to being locked up in machines so fearsome that only our husbands can open them? For me, at least, tomorrow is another trouser-wearing day.

 — Emily Rhodes

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After all, Hollande hails from Rouen, the very city that plays host to Madame Bovary’s adulterous affair with Léon Dupois. It is at Rouen cathedral that Emma Bovary initially resists Léon’s amorous advances — that is, until he hails a cab, bundles her in, and evidently employs some persuasive behaviour while they are snugly ensconced. Famously, all that emerges from the carriage is a climactic ‘bared hand’, which casts out ‘some scraps of paper that scattered in the wind, and farther off lighted like white butterflies on a field of red clover all in bloom’. Emma’s virtuous letter, written to put Léon off, doesn’t do the trick. Could this be the fate of the European budget discipline pact, torn into shreds after Hollande’s powers of persuasion are exercised to the full?

But Emma and Léon’s love affair is doomed from the start. Emma Bovary is a creature of extravagance, longing for luxury as a means to escape what she perceives to be a very dull provincial life. She only takes the fateful carriage ride with Léon when he tells her it’s the done thing in fashionable Paris. She insists on enjoying an expensive lifestyle with him, and when he cannot afford it, she makes up the deficit herself. It’s a moral low point when she makes Léon pawn a set of silver spoons that she was given as a wedding present.

Emma’s downfall isn’t her adultery, it’s her reckless extravagance. She falls prey to the dastardly merchant Lheureux, who sells her far too many gorgeous fabrics and other beautiful things, telling her she can pay him another time. And so Emma spend-spend-spends, meeting what debts she incurs with yet more debts, and selling off more and more of her poor husband’s property.

We all know the sad ending of Madame Bovary. Alas, Emma’s fantasies of the high life cannot last for ever. The time comes when she can put off her creditors no longer; she has to cough up. In despair, she turns to her lovers for money, but to no avail. She decides there’s nothing for it but arsenic, and kills herself, dying rather gruesomely.

Live within your means, seems to be the message here. Well, let’s hope his flirtation with spending isn’t political suicide for this other creature of Rouen.

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Perhaps this pair of Oxford toffs should learn a lesson from the quintessential Oxford toff, Brideshead Revisited’s Sebastian Flyte. He would never dream of buying a pint of milk from the corner shop; his milk would be poured for him, from a jug, at teatime. Sebastian is certainly arrogant and far too busy drinking, vomiting in other people’s rooms, guzzling strawberries and buying eccentric presents for his teddy bear to care about the lives of other people.

But the hoi polloi don’t despise Sebastian for his posh, whimsical ways, his out-of-touchness and self-centredness. On the contrary: no one can help but fall for his charm. The barber who sells Sebastian an ivory hairbrush for his teddy bear, ‘had had ample chance to tire of undergraduate fantasy [and yet] was plainly captivated’. The scout who has to clean up his sick, initially appalled, is swiftly won over: ‘A most amusing gentleman, I’m sure it’s quite a pleasure to clean up after him.’ And, of course, Charles Ryder, the novel’s narrator, gets over his cynicism to fall for Sebastian hook, line and sinker.

Alas Sebastian’s spiral is a downward one, and drinking gets the better of him. He ends up wafting around a monastery in Morocco. But even then, explains his sister Julia, ‘He’s still loved, you see, wherever he goes, whatever condition he’s in. It’s a thing about him he’ll never lose.’ I bet David Cameron would give his right arm to be loved, ‘wherever he goes, whatever condition he’s in’. Then he wouldn’t have to worry about people like Nadine Dorries getting so cross about his poshness.

The thing about Sebastian Flyte is that, perhaps a bit like Boris, he throws himself into things – getting absolutely smashed, falling terrifically in love, sending a whole roomful of flowers. Perhaps it would be a little over the top for a prime minister, but Sebastian’s enthusiasm certainly comes with charm.

No, it’s most definitely not advisable for David Cameron and George Osborne to hit the bottle and become reckless and vulnerable drunks, but perhaps they could adopt a little of Sebastian’s passion and embrace their own eccentricities, instead of trying endlessly to concoct personas they think middle England will like. And I’d love to know what they’d call their teddy bears.

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