British Politics Thread

Nick Clegg is that rare thing: a figure of both fun and hate. Britain’s deputy prime minister is the most despised politician in a country that knows how to despise politicians. He has driven his Liberal Democrats into the ground, or more precisely 6 per cent in the polls. He is lampooned as the cuckold of the coalition, oblivious to the rings run around him by worldlier Conservatives. He wanted a new electoral model. Voters laughed it out of town. He wanted House of Lords reform. Tories nixed it. His animating causes – Europe, civil liberties – have gone backwards.

He might also be the most effective politician around: the one who consistently does the most with the least promising circumstances. When he speaks to his party conference on Wednesday, eight months before a general election they all dread, he does not need to beg for his reputation.

When Mr Clegg took over the Lib Dems at the end of 2007, they were expected to bleed votes at the subsequent election. Their audience had been inflated by the Iraq war, which they had opposed, but the protest voters were expected to trudge back to Labour and the Tories. That bleak prognosis has since been forgotten, but it was the dismal cloud over his leadership in those early years.

In the event, he actually increased the Lib Dem vote in 2010, denying the Conservatives victory and putting his party into government for the first time since the second world war. David Cameron, the prime minister, has made the Tories semi-electable. Ed Miliband has kept the Labour party together when a great unwinding seemed probable. But Mr Clegg’s gift to his party is of another order altogether: he has changed its raison d’être from protest to power.

By forming the coalition, he also gave Britain a durable government at a precarious moment. The alternative was minority Tory rule: a government living hand to mouth as Europe’s sovereign debt crisis reached its acute stage.

The Lib Dems’ attainment of power is not as impressive as their comportment in power. They have shown so much more discipline and poise than the Tories, you have to double-check the records that say Mr Cameron’s party is the one with decades of barely interrupted experience of government. Even as their poll ratings found new fathoms to sink to, the Lib Dems avoided outward panic. In the Bizarro World of British politics, Mr Clegg, now a vote loser, provokes no audible dissent from his party whereas Mr Cameron, the Tories’ trump card, has to babysit his hysterical malcontents every few months.

There is more to Mr Clegg than guile and self-preservation. His presence in government has changed the country materially. It is doubtful the Tories alone could have tightened fiscal policy by so much and for so long without sparking a popular reaction. The Lib Dems have legitimised a lot of harsh but necessary work by giving it the imprimatur of bipartisanship. They also authored the single biggest change to the British tax system in recent years: a rise in the income tax threshold that is so popular the Tories have deftly plagiarised it in time for the election.

If Mr Clegg’s lot in life can seem wretched and thankless, there is a consolation. He can now feel more confident of remaining in power beyond May than any party leader. Neither Mr Cameron nor Mr Miliband can count on a parliamentary majority. The Lib Dems probably need to keep only half of their 56 seats to decide who governs. This brings its own agonies, and Mr Clegg might have to choose between a Labour party wielding a plurality of seats and a Tory party bearing a plurality of votes. If the UK Independence party beat the Lib Dems in vote share, Britain could be governed by a Lib-Lab coalition comprising the second most popular party propped up by the fourth most popular party. A crisis of legitimacy might provoke another election in short order.

Another deal with the Tories would cast the Lib Dems as a party of the liberal right, probably forever. But the leftwing voters it used to attract are gone anyway. And coalition talks with Mr Cameron represent a vast opportunity because he must secure his promised referendum on EU membership; his party will not wear anything less. So the Lib Dems can demand almost whatever they want in return.

In an election so close and so intricately laced with permutations, confident predictions are a mug’s game. But it is plausible that a Conservative-Liberal coalition that many doubted would see out the summer of 2010 will end up governing for a decade, with Mr Clegg somewhere near its helm. For a man everyone believes is half-clown, half-huckster, it is some feat.