No, honestly, I want to know: why haven’t the Lib Dems quit

Why would you be a Lib Dem? That’s a rhetorical question, obviously, because I think we all know that the bulk of well-meaning, ineffectual perverts actually read the New Statesman. But still, imagine you were one. What’s it all for? And, more to the point, why are you still in government?

I keep asking this question of people cleverer than me, and they keep chuckling, as though I’m making a gag. But I’m serious. Why are the coalition’s junior partners still in there? Even the numbers of people prepared to have weird sex with them must be dropping on a daily basis. Why do they keep turning up for work?

Argument one: the Lib Dems are actually achieving plenty, just quietly.

Come off it. No they aren’t. There was the pupil premium, which I’ll have to ­Google one of these days, and I’m aware there has been some terribly significant wibbling with pensions. And fixed-term parliaments, which we shall come to. But other than that? An AV referendum which you lose humiliatingly isn’t much of an achievement. The rise in the tax threshold can’t have been a hard sell to the Tories, given that it’s effectively a tax cut, and House of Lords reform is a fiasco. Plus, all these things have already happened. What are your plans for the next two years?

Argument two: the Lib Dems are dragging the government to the left.

This is a view popular among Lib Dems, because it makes them feel noble, and popular among some slightly deranged Tories, too, because it reinforces that creeping view that everything would be alright if only Nadine Dorries were in charge. But it’s drivel. Remember the Conservative party at the start of 2006? It was all hug-a-hoodie, windfarms and huskies.