Flickr/Liberal Democrats. Some rights reserved.
Last year Nick Clegg and his predecessor, coach and trainer Paddy Ashdown, shaped the future of Britain. If only for the briefest of moments it is worth looking back at what happened, not least as it also signals the shallow nature of the Tory victory.
Clegg and Ashdown claim to be the tough hard-fighting realists, the true patriots who saved the country from the extremes of Tory supremacy. This conceit is blown out the water by Patrick Wintour and Nicholas Watt’s long, fascinating account of the Clegg leadership of the Lib Dems in the Guardian. In May 2014, after the local and European elections prefigured this year’s Lib Dem parliamentary wipeout, Clegg called Ashdown saying, “If I am the problem I will resign”. Ashdown, for it was surely he, replied "tough titties” and told him to carry on. Wintour and Watt quote Ashdown telling them that Clegg moved with “astonishing speed... from the darkest of the dark nights of the soul to utterly on form, utterly clear about what he was doing”. The ridiculously hyperbolic language tells us the opposite: the clarity Clegg enjoyed was the bright light of self-deception.
