Let Nick Clegg be clear: “The Liberal Democrats will add a heart to a Conservative government, and a brain to a Labour one!” Unfortunately, courage for the cowardly lion will be a casualty of any coalition agreement. It’s like Dorothy says: “If you were really great and powerful, you’d keep your promises!”
The awkward problem with Lib Dem manifestos, given recent experience, is that they are manifestly flawed. To read them is to wonder idly: If Nick Clegg were to reprise his role of love interest in a hung parliament, which one of these policies would be first up against the wall?
Only this morning Clegg had been declaring that his five manifesto pledges would assume “a near-religious status” for his party, so the form book suggests there’s a deicide in the offing. Look, no one wants to be a downer on manifesto launch day. But even in the best case scenario, one of these policies would be driven to a remote forest location by some psychopathic coalition senior partner, then made to dig its own grave with a Lib Dem campaign pen.
Bafflingly, this wasn’t the image the party went for at this morning’s big event. The launch was held in a fashionable London arts space, the Emerald City apparently being unavailable. There weren’t nearly enough seats, which indicates a Lib Dem commitment to providing their own electoral metaphors. That one’s a red line, in the parlance of our times.
Anyway, the venue was packed with easels bearing big photos of all the different Nick Cleggs in action, with not a single other Lib Dem minister or MP in sight. There was Gardener Clegg, Painter Clegg, Handyman Clegg, Cuppa Clegg, Malibu Stacy Clegg … Gotta catch ’em all. The only glaring absence was Deputy Prime Minister Clegg, perhaps because – as his introducer pointed out – “the last five years have been somewhat testing for us”.
Still, Clegg was at great pains to point out that this was exactly what we had wanted. “Five years ago,” he put it, “the British people chose to do things differently.” A hung parliament was “your decision”. “You chose it.” “You gave no party the right to govern on their own.”
OK, OK, we get it. IT’S ALL ON US. “You gave the Liberal Democrats the chance to join the government for the first time in generations…”
Oh man. Are we still doing this? “We could have ignored you.”
I wish you would. “We did the responsible thing. We did the fair thing. We did the gutsy thing.”
It was fighting talk. And yet, as far as his place in British politics goes, Nick Clegg increasingly seems to see himself as analogous to Spinal Tap bassist Derek Smalls, who declared himself to mediate between the fire and ice of his two bandmates – “kind of like lukewarm water”.
This results in self-parodic policy messages, such as: “We’ll borrow £70bn less than Labour. We’ll cut £50bn less than the Tories.” If you’re not sure what that actually means, you’re getting bogged down in way too much detail. Try to imagine this election as a lovely big moodboard, with the Liberal Democrats putting lukewarm water at the heart of Westminster.
Whether you would buy an insurance policy from Nick Clegg is a matter for you: he certainly has one on offer. This morning, he held it aloft and declared: “This manifesto is an insurance policy against a government lurching off to extremes.”
The manifesto itself is 160 pages long – twice the length of those of the Conservatives and Labour. It contains the same number of words as The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, and is more than three-quarters the length of The Great Gatsby (though obviously eleventy times more important).
Clegg’s warm-up act was Lib Dem president Sal Brinton, who reinforced the sense that this election is becoming a comically unedifying turf war over meaningless bits of vocabulary. According to Brinton, the Lib Dems started using the slogan “Stronger economy, fairer society” three whole years ago, which felt a little like David Brent claiming “same shit, different day” as his own. “Then it was fascinating that the Conservatives stole ‘stronger economy’,” Brinton suggested. “And then Labour decided that ‘fairer society’ was nice.” At current rate of ideological collapse, the parties will go into the 2020 election having copyrighted words like “secure” and “hardworking”.
Still, for those who like both the words “stronger economy” and “fairer society”, there is incredibly reassuring news in Clegg’s rousing conclusion. “This manifesto proves you don’t have to choose between them,” he declared. “If you choose the Liberal Democrats, you can have both.” So there you have it. You can have your cake and eat it and make a sort of word trifle out of it too. Just pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.
