It’s fair to say that Nick Clegg has been getting pelters lately. From his own party, for selling out. From the opposition parties, for selling out. From hardline Tories, for not being a Tory. From the media, because the whole Bromance story was just to good to resist. But there’s a question that keeps trotting through my head.
What else should he have done?
After the election, there was no clear winner. In that situation, the options are either for one party to try to govern as a minority, for a coalition to be formed or for everyone to throw up their hands in despair and have another election. David Cameron wanted a coalition. Should Nick Clegg have said,
“No, thank you David, I am too pure for that, I will enter government only as leader of a Liberal Democrat administration, which is clearly never going to happen because you won’t ever introduce electoral reform on your own, so basically I’m admitting that my entire party is a joke”?
That would have gone down well, wouldn’t it? He would have scuppered the Lib Dem’s chances of being taken seriously again for at least another five years, possibly a generation. His only other option was to form a coalition with Labour instead: but given that the media had already coined the damning phrase, “Coalition of the Losers”, that would have lasted about ten minutes before collapsing in a foaming pile of headlines and swollen egos.
He did the only thing he could do. To have done otherwise would be the equivalent of me throwing a strop at work because I’d been asked to get involved with a project alongside someone I didn’t get on with. I can’t imagine that my boss would take well to me wandering into his office and announcing,
“Mr Boss, I cannot work with Archie McWhipwhop and his team. I do not intend to undertake this project unless I can work exclusively with people who I already know are going to agree with me on most stuff, because I either cannot be bothered arguing or have a total lack of faith in my powers of persuasion. I don’t care that you’ve told me this is what you want, I’m only going to do the job if I can have everything all my own way”.
My boss is a nice guy, but I’m pretty sure he’d tell me to bog off and get on with it. And that’s the only credible response that our politicians could make to the election result. Bog off and get on with it. It is beginning to look worryingly as though their idea of getting on with it is to sack everybody and shut everything: but that’s a problem of policy, not political structure.