The clunking Clegg.
It's Nick Clegg then. Or, probably more interestingly, it's Jacob Zuma. Perhaps if the Lib Dem leadership contest had been between a man acquitted of rape who had a shower after unprotected sex to ensure he didn't contract HIV and another who believes there is no connection between HIV and AIDS, the turnout might have gone up rather than down on the last contest, itself only conducted last January.My own failure to raise any enthusiasm for the leadership contest seems to have been the default position even amongst most Liberal Democrats. Presented to them were two white men, one slightly younger and fresher faced than the other, both privately educated at err, the same school, both with much the same ideas as each other. Oh, Huhne tried to flush out Clegg's previous propensity towards more free-market ideology concerning the public services, and there were epithets of Calamity Clegg, but that was as far as it went. Their stupefying performances on both Newsnight and Question Time, apart from being soporific, only reinforced the notion that there was very little to nothing whatsoever to choose between them.
That impression is hardly going to be changed by Clegg's acceptance speech, after winning the vote by only slightly more than 500 votes. It might be that we've gotten use to leadership changes in politics recently, but it all sounded so familiar. Change and ambition! Ambition and change! Renewed ambition for Britain! Change Britain! Ambition to change Britain! Britain to change ambition! Change to Britain ambition! And so forth. Interchangeable to a T, the only real difference to the other leaders of the main political parties was Clegg's similarly tedious repetition of just how liberal both he and Britain is. You don't get that impression reading the Mail and Sun forums, that's for sure.
After all, this ought to be so easy for the Liberal Democrats. Clegg rightly identifies that Labour and the Conservatives are mutating into each other, but he's wrong that left and right have broken down. They're still there, just, it's that Labour and the Conservatives haven't wanted to be constrained by those labels for all the wrong reasons. The sense that Labour is decaying is becoming ever more evident, while David Cameron is so opportunistic that he's claiming to be a progressive with which even the Greens can find common cause. Somehow you can't imagine John Redwood and Caroline Lucas belonging to the same party. Brown has blown his inheritance while the Tories offer absolutely nothing but more of the same but with a slightly nastier face.
Given the choice, you get the feeling that most of the membership would have settled for Vince Cable staying in the job. Few politicians have made such an impact as he has in two months, going from a man with a charisma bypass who didn't look much younger than poor old Ming himself to a clunking fist in record time, or to use his own analogy backwards, from Mr Bean to Stalin. Granted, as Charles Kennedy has pointed out, he's had the benefit of knowing that he hasn't got to do the job permanently and with few of the duties of an actual leader, but from his boycott of the Saudi royal visit to his authority over the Northern Rock debacle, he's both sounded and played the part with panache.
Clegg will pick up the mantle with difficulty. Despite the lack of real difference, I slightly favoured Huhne for the position, more because Clegg seems a Cameron clone, or rather a clone of a clone, considering Cameron's own impersonation of Blair. He has yet to convince on any subject, while Huhne has handled his environment shadow job well. Going by his current performance on Newsnight, where his response to Paxman's question on three things where he would be advancing the Liberal Democrats, he said they would be concentrating more on education, health and crime; in other words, just like the other parties. Things, it seems, can only get worse.
Labels: Chris Huhne, Liberal Democrat leadership contest, Liberal Democrats, new politics, Nick Clegg, tedium
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