So it is with Nick Clegg. Last May, not quite Midas but certainly the new golden boy of British politics, he put the Liberals back into Cabinet seats for the first time as a result of an election in almost 100 years.
For him, with a Euro-aristocratic background which included jobs at the heart of European Union power, Government was the obvious, most comfortable place to be. Even if it meant tearing up most of the important election pledges the Liberal Democrats campaigned on. He led a much more nervous and doubting party into a coalition which appeared then, and is now, blue-blooded Conservative. And he proved to millions of voters – not least students – that he had led them up the garden path.
This May, the man who, whether it hurts his feelings or not, has become the punchbag of British politics is to lead his party to a kicking in the local elections. Well, not quite lead. Such is the wrath of the electorate that in some areas, notably even his own constituency of Sheffield Hallam, Liberal Democrats won’t even deploy a campaign mugshot of the politician hailed a year ago as the most popular since Winston Churchill. The odds on Mr Clegg ever being re-elected for the seat in which he failed to lift a hand to save hundreds of jobs at the Forgemasters steelworks recede by the day.
And as if an emphatic underscore were needed to sum up his punchbag status, he gets duffed up by Duffy – Gillian Duffy, the Rochdale pensioner who made Gordon Brown’s election campaign memorable for all the wrong reasons and who confronted the Deputy Prime Minister with the question many in his own party must be asking with the benefit of hindsight: “Why [did you go] with the Conservatives last year instead of Labour?”
And in a more polite version of the “how do you sleep at night?” question, she asked: “Can you honestly tell me now, look me in the eye, and say that you’re quite happy with all these policies that have gone wrong for your party?” With that sort of sentiment rife in the public mind it is little wonder that local Labour parties such as Sittingbourne and Sheppey have flipped the Sheffield Hallam effect and plastered Mr Clegg’s face all over their own election material.
Last May, the Lib Dem leader told television audiences that there was a choice other than the “same old parties”, promising “something new, something different”. What he has delivered is a bonfire of promises, a spaghetti junction of U-turns, a shabby compromise of principles and support for a clutch of policies which are set to wreck the National Health Service, the education system and the social fabric of Britain. All the while David Cameron – with the Tory vote apparently holding up in the party’s heartlands – is sitting back and watching Mr Clegg soak up the punches.
If he has feelings, Mr Clegg should be really hurting. But not as much as his party.
