I’m quite warming to David Cameron. Oh, yes, he’s unbearably pompous, terribly prim, he’s got a profile like Punch, skin that looks like it’s been freshly gloss-painted and he’s got “Bullingdon” running through him like a stick of Blackpool rock. But stand him next to Nick Clegg and he looks reasonably affable. Actually, I don’t believe in Clegg. That’s not to say he doesn’t exist. Sadly, he does – but not in any real sense. He’s more like an amalgam, a robotic talking machine assembled by a coven of political spin-doctors.
They’ve squeezed together a hint of Tony Blair (the air of a constipated and rather sycophantic choirboy), a touch of Ashdown (the puffy chest) and more than a suggestion of a bit-part actor in rep.
The Frankenstein-inspired fiends who put this monster together figured the shy grin would attract the males as appearing non-confrontational; the firm torso would pull in the female vote and the thespian gestures would sweep up the “don’t knows”. Then they inserted the talking element.
Clegg can talk about anything for hours. His specialist subject is Nicholas William Peter Clegg, but he happily rambles about any subject, ejecting word pollution that specialises in inherent contradictions. He was in particularly good form when discharging phrases about proposed changes to the House of Lords, declaiming: “Clearly, our fixed goal is greater democratic legitimacy for the Other Place but we will be pragmatic in order to achieve it.”
OK. So, let’s break that down. We want democratic legitimacy. If, unlike Clegg, you are human, there is only one form of democratic legitimacy. That is people being voted into office: having been elected. Then the machine says he wants this for “the Other Place”. What’s all this about? Does he mean the House of Lords? If so, why doesn’t he say that? It’s the same number of words – three – so it’s not like he’s saving energy. So perhaps he doesn’t really mean the Lords? Perhaps he doesn’t even mean Earth. He could mean the planet Zog. Or heaven. In fact, I’ve just realised there is a tad of country vicar stirred in there with the Blair, Ashdown and thespian. Then he meanders into some nonsense about implementation needing to be “ pragmatic”. What can he be talking about? Pragmatic means solving problems in a realistic way. There’s only one realistic way of making “the Other Place” democratically legitimate. That is to elect it. That is genuinely not complex.
Enough said? Undoubtedly, but there are faults with the machine’s pause button. He suddenly changes tack and suggests that 60 of the “Other Placers” shouldn’t be elected after all. They can be appointed by their mates, which is the current system.
And, incidentally, the polar opposite of “ democratically legitimate’. Despite recent howlers, he can’t even stop there, announcing he favours the single transferable vote system. Has he no memory device been inserted, alerting him to his sound thrashing when he championed AV? On the other hand, if anyone knows about transferability, it’s Nick. He transferred from being a cuddly Liberal to a free-market Tory faster than you can say: “Snout in the trough”.
There is also evidence that the Blair-clergyman implants jerk to the fore from time to time in unexpected places, for example when he says he’d like a provision for 12 bishops in his “Other Place”. If this is democratically legitimate, who had the vote? God? That’s not an election. It’s an appointment, because there is only one God, as the bishops will tell you. That, unlike politics, is their area. The only solution would be to have an elected God, or at least one approved in a referendum. There were problems in the end for Mary Shelley’s monster and I predict a similar outcome for the Clegg machine unless modifications are made. Otherwise we risk the joy of seeing him explode, Scrabble-like, in a cloud of letters that land face up spelling out the word “Charlatan”.
