The Metropolis

The Josh Hall Column: Oh, how Nick Clegg wishes he were President Bartlett

Josh Hall | Thursday 22 September, 2011 14:34

David Spender photo

What a glorious pantomime the Liberal Democrat Conference was. Half cult assembly, half beautifully executed exercise in collective delusion, it made for horrific yet compulsive viewing.

Monday’s Newsnight was a high point. Filmed in the empty conference hall, it saw Jeremy Paxman (a man for whom I normally have little but contempt) address a rag-tag bunch of blank-eyed automaton activists, all of whom cheered and booed and hissed at the appropriate moments. They appeared like slightly unhinged children stuck in the bodies of quietly neurotic, middle class quinoa enthusiasts who consider reading the Guardian supplements to be a revolutionary activity. They laughed knowingly while Paxman explained their party’s peerless dishonesty, as if it was some nudge-nudge in-joke.

Then Nick Clegg, the One True Hope of the faux-left, arrived to heal the rifts, to suture the wounds. He had clearly been told, by whichever poor bastard it who has to bathe him in the morning and perpetuate the myth that he is a grownup who can think for himself, that he needed a Great Orator moment. “Remember I Agree With Nick,” they said. “You can be the British Obama! Non-partisan politics! Tough decisions! Not easy but right!”

Of course, Clegg is no great orator. His rhythm and inflection were so transparently cribbed from Inspirational West Wing Speeches that it was difficult to focus on what he was saying. As it happens, the content wasn’t much better than the delivery. It was, essentially, 45 minutes of pseudo-motivational platitudes of the sort uttered by a sales manager in an ailing technology firm – the kind that still sells dictionaries on CD-ROM, crippled by its own anachronism, and which will soon be wound up quietly, noticed only by the half dozen remaining employees. As the Lib Dems are all too happy to point out, Clegg is indeed punching above his weight. He is a dilettante, wholly unqualified for public office, who has somehow found his way into government. He has been a big fish in a laughably small pond, and now that he finds himself in open waters he is being devoured.

Conference did, however, underline the three-way split that has occurred within the party. The first portion consists of people who are not members or activists, but voters. Broadly well-meaning individuals enticed by the prospect of a ‘new politics’. They have, of course, deserted.

The second portion is made up of the delusional enthusiasts who helpfully agreed to appear on Newsnight. They are telling themselves, and anyone else who will listen, that the Lib Dems are encouraging the government to follow a “liberal path” – apparently by consistently voting in the way that the Tories tell them to. A sizeable proportion of these people will wake up one morning in around ten or twenty or thirty years’ time, realise that they facilitated the dismantling of the NHS, and silently weep.

But it is the third portion that poses the biggest threat. These people were, surprise surprise, never ‘liberal’ at all. Twenty seconds in government and the principles they exclaimed about so loudly have mysteriously vanished. Indeed, they seem to relish the injustices they are inflicting. It is as if the bullied child has been offered the jackboot, and the newfound power has rendered him psychotic.

New examples of this sad and yet utterly predictable malaise appear every day. But this oddly fascistic new tendency is beautifully summed up by the words of Will Miéville-Hawkins, president of the Birmingham University Liberal Democrats Society.

During Conference, a group of activists hung a banner from a bridge in Birmingham. It read, ‘Traitors Not Welcome’. No damage was caused. All the protesters were arrested. One of them, Ed Bauer, remains in prison, and will spend at least 10 days incarcerated without trial.

Mr Miéville-Hawkins response to this peaceful expression of dissent? “Mr. Bauer’s actions this weekend show his contempt for democracy and free association.”

How quickly the fuzzy-left veneer has been stripped away – and how terrifyingly bleak the truth below it appears.

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