News Flash: Nick Clegg is actually a politician

He's not a charity worker or a celebrity campaigner like Joanna Lumley. He's a plain old politician, ie he will say and do just about anything to get you to vote for him.




As I explained in my previous post, I don't think Clegg won the leaders' debate on ITV. Based on analysis of the arguments I declared Gordon Brown the winner.



Now Clegg-mania seems to have taken hold. The surge in the Lib Dems popularity is out of all proportion to his performance in the debate and his actual arguments. His surge has been almost entirely media hype. Boris Johnson got it right when he said that the Clegg bubble was the biggest load of guff since Diana's funeral. Why? Well firstly because a lot of people who have switched suddenly to the Lib Dems didn't actually watch the debate. Secondly because the media needed to construct some excitement and so have whipped up a frenzy. And thirdly because people have taken to Clegg in the mistaken belief that he isn't a politician; that he's just a voter like them who is fed up with the status quo and thinks the scoundrels in Parliament should just be given a good kicking.



We live in an age that worships the cult of celebrity and is driven by the media. Stunted by information overload in every area of media communications the public has an insatiable appetite for novelty. Our attention spans have decreased and the depth of discourse, especially about politics, has plummeted.



So Clegg appears as the non-politician. There was Cameron, happily thinking that he would sail to victory by donning the mantle of 'change', when along came Clegg with an even more engaging 'change' narrative: these two tired old parties have run Britain for decades, so why not try something new? The public seem to be buying it and Labour and the Tories are at sixes and sevens over what to do about it.



I've just seen Eric Pickles, the Tory party chairman, on the BBC News Channel, insisting that the Tories have much in common with the Liberal Democrats. In the debate Brown was falling over himself to insist that "I agree with Nick" over and over. Both parties have resorted to 'love bombing rather than carpet-bombing' the Lib Dems, in the words of a journalist on the News Channel. They have calculated that attacking him makes them looking even more like the old entrenched parties of the past, doggedly defending the status quo and resisting 'change'. That accursed word again.



But Nick Clegg is not really an agent of change. Well he is proposing some changes, like separating the retail and investment arms of banks, which is a very good thing. And taking the first £10k of earnings out of tax, which is an excellent thing. But as I've explained before, you couldn't fit a cigarette paper between the parties on ideological grounds. Thanks to Labour the country is virtually bankrupt, so the next administration - Con, Lab, Lib or coalition - will be a government that administers, not changes.



Today's Guardian made a laughable (and I hope tongue-in-cheek) comparison between Clegg and Obama. Presumably because he is now the owner of all the change-y hope-y stuff. But he has been in politics a while now. The Liberals have been around in some shape or form since 1857. He yells and barracks in Parliament as well as the rest of them. He has made some good noises about rolling back the nanny state and devolving power to people but is also mad-keen on shedding m more power up to Brussels and the European superstate. He wants your money. And he wants not so much change as power. Whatever his pluses, and the Liberal Democrats' strong points - and they have many - no-one should lose sight of this.