LibDem Turkeys

It has just been announced on the PM programme that Nick Clegg has phoned the French Government to complain about the tone of recent comments attacking the UK and the City. 

Stand by for waves of laughter washing across the channel. As Ian Bell wrote in yesterdays Herald:

“Mr Clegg is in a ludicrous position. The leader of the most explicitly Europhile Westminster party has been complicit in the most reckless of eurosceptic gestures. The party that supposedly wants Britain at the heart of Europe, as a matter of principle, has allowed Britain to be pushed to the margins.

Subsequent LibDem "protests" have been laboured or preposterous. If Mr Clegg thought he could satisfy anyone by going into hiding while Mr Cameron faced the Commons he truly does believe voters are dummies. His colleagues have been equally fatuous. They can huff and puff: everyone knows they will not quit the Coalition. No price is now too high.

Their choice is simple: shut up and play along with the Tory script or face annihilation at the polls. That being so, however, it is no longer enough to say that the Lib Dems have exhausted every last reason they ever had for being in government. That was true, in every important respect, before the veto row. Mr Clegg's only real remaining role in political life is to make Mr Cameron's brand of Conservatism possible.

How is that defined as the national interest from any conceivable Liberal Democrat perspective? The claim that Mr Clegg and his colleagues would exploit their positions in Government to restrain the Tories has been exposed, once and for all, as nonsense. One by one, the "worst excesses", the excesses the Liberal Democrats were supposed to prevent, are happening.

There is no way back for Mr Clegg. He can stagger on to the next General Election, but his fate, and his party's fate, is sealed. He has no more crumbs of comfort to offer even to the most blindly loyal of his remaining supporters.

Ed Miliband and Labour would be well advised, then, to have nothing to do with this toxic brand. Flirting with the Liberal Democrats will not be well received by the mass of voters who have seen enough and heard enough”.Ian Bell Herald 15/12/11

There is one hope for the LibDem turkeys trying to avoid Christmas. It is that something will turn up.........

Telling off the French  from a positively puny position is not it.