It’s twelve months of Nick Clegg’s Liberal Democrat leadership today and he celebrates by giving an interview to The Independent, saying he wants to be taken seriously. “It would help if he didn’t claim to have slept with up to 30 women,” said Nick Ferrari on LBC this morning. Andrew Pierce then came on and pointed out that this was unfair: we don’t know if they were all women. And this is the tragedy for Cleggover: this is all people care about. Last week in PMQs he said that a single mother with two children had come to see him in his constituency, and the House roared with laughter – the joke being that might well have been the father. (It shows what guilty minds these MPs have). Alas poor Clegg: what’s up?
It’s even more of a tragedy because he has been making good points, and often ahead of the pack. As I’ve argued here, he made the tax cut point ahead of anyone else. But when everyone else piled in, everyone forgot Clegg had been there first. At the summer reception for Centre Forum – a Liberal Democrat think tank – he spoke eloquently about how Brown had expanded the cost of government faster than anyone else in the developed world, and this was a deeply alarming trend for reasons not just of waste but basic liberty. Rhetorically, at least, he has tried to reposition his party back to its ‘classic liberal’ roots, unlike Kennedy who sought to out-socialist Labour (with much electoral success).
The problem is that Clegg looks too much like Cameron to stand out. Vince Cable has a far higher profile, and reputation (as George Osborne said at the Threadneedle/Spectator parliamentarian of the year awards, no one noticed when Clegg took over from Cable’s temporary stewardship). There is no Iraq war for the two main parties to agree on, and the LibDems to then offer dissent from. There is no issue: to borrow Matthew Parris’s wonderful analogy, no triangle he can ping in
the orchestral cacophony of Westminster. Pierce argued this morning that if the LibDem campaign had gone on for another fortnight then Huhne would have won, as his campaign picked up steam. Something tells me that, after the election, Huhne may well have a second go.
P.S. The Times has taken that Parris sketch offline, but I hope they won’t mind if I reprint here the first few pars – from 25 Sep 01. It’s the perfect summary of the task facing a LibDem leader:
“Keynote speeches are a tough assignment at any time, and for a Liberal Democrat leader kicking off a party conference in a world on the verge of war they don’t come tougher. Should he bang the drum like a Tory? Should he sound the trumpet like Tony Blair? No, as he strolled on to the conference platform after lunch in Bournemouth yesterday, Charles Kennedy, whose party has no appetite for the percussion or the brass of politics, knew his place in the democratic orchestra. He must ping the triangle. The only question would be whether he pinged it well. He did. He pinged it beautifully. It was a grave ping, a polite ping, a tasteful ping, and, mercifully, a short ping. Mr Kennedy’s ping was not so loud as to disrupt the national martial symphony, nor so soft as to go unheard. His ping did not miss the beat of war. But it was
very slightly out of step, not so much breaking the rhythm as introducing a small, syncopated tinkle. Kennedy struck a note not of opposition or of pacifism but of independence. He and his party would do war their way.”
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