You Know, 2 Days After The Ohio & North Carolina Primaries, The U.K. Has Something Too

It would be next to impossible for Nick Clegg, Leader of the Liberal Democrats, to wind up as Prime Minister after the May 6th Parliamentary elections. The entire campaign for 649 seats (the election in Thirsk and Malton, in North Yorkshire, has been postponed for 3 weeks because the candidate for a local teabagger party died) started on April 6. The teabaggers aren't being taken seriously anyway and have been excluded from the big televised debates between Gordon Brown (Labour), David Cameron (Conservative) and Nick Clegg (Liberal Democrat). Currently Labour holds 356 seats (35.3% of the 2005 vote), the Conservatives 198 seats (32.3%) and the Liberal Democrats 62 seats (22.1%), although if you look at the percentages in parenthesis, you'll see that the portion of the vote each party got does correspond to the number of seats they won in Parliament. If the electoral system was a bit more direct, the Liberal Democrats would have won 135 seats. This time they're expected to do a lot better in terms of the number of votes they get but perhaps not too much better in the number of seats they win.

The Liberal Democrats look likely, however, to hold the balance of power in a hung Parliament. Labour would like to form a coalition with them but Clegg says he won't do it unless proportional representation is enacted (for obvious reasons). He was considered the winner-- barely (and mostly by default)-- of the first debate and what they did was short-circuit the Conservatives who have unleashed the hounds of hell-- their ubiquitous media network-- on him. The normal right-wing smears haven't worked... so far.

The rightwing press, if it has any sense, will be holding an inquest tonight on how it tried to damage Nick Clegg, but instead managed to reveal a touch of desperation, divide the Tory party and probably leave Clegg not just unscathed but martyred.


Four rightwing papers splashed different attacks against Clegg, making it look like a vast rightwing conspiracy. In fact, newspapers are genuinely competitive, and will not have coordinated this assault, and if anything will be rueing the fact that they all independently pressed the panic button on the same day, since it now does indeed looks like a conspiracy.
I do not know, but I would be surprised if Conservative headquarters had much directly to do with it, as Lord Mandelson alleged this afternoon.

A "senior strategist"-- George Osborne I imagine-- mused anonymously in Tuesday's FT that he hoped the rightwing press would do the Tory Party's dirty work to undermine Clegg. This would leave David Cameron free to redouble the positive.

But these political attacks look like they were dreamed up in the offices of the newspapers themselves, largely drawing on published sources.

Potentially the most serious attack was mounted by the Telegraph. It claimed that private businessman had put money in 2006 into Clegg's private account to pay staff, and then implied there was no need for this to be done since the cost of paying his small staff was covered by the taxpayer.

The unstated implication was that Clegg was being bankrolled personally by these businessmen. The odious Alistair Graham, the chairman of the commission on smears on people in public life, was then wheeled out to say it is suspicious, and irregular-- two epithets best applied to him.

Clegg has now produced the bank statements to prove that the payments from the businessmen were indeed transferred monthly onto the Liberal Democrats to pay for his researcher.

Indeed he gave the party more than the businessmen had provided. All these donations were properly registered with the relevant authorities...I suspect the rightwing press are watching a boomerang coming very fast towards them.

Last night there was a second debate, considered more fiery. The three party leaders all did well and the BBC's political editor, Nick Robinson offered that as proof that there's "a tight three horse race."

Opinion polls taken immediately after the debate gave conflicting verdicts over whether Mr Cameron or Mr Clegg came out on top but they agreed that the margins between all three contenders were much tighter than in the first debate.

But BBC polling expert David Cowling said there had been a significant drop in the number of people who thought Mr Clegg won, with Mr Brown having the most improved ratings.

The debate itself was livelier than last week, with flashes of anger from Mr Cameron in particular as he accused Labour of spreading "lies" about Tory policy on benefits for the elderly in election leaflets, telling Mr Brown he should be "ashamed" of them...

Mr Brown made a point of attacking Mr Cameron and Mr Clegg equally, rounding off his closing statement by telling his two rivals: "Nick you would leave us weak, David you would leave us isolated in Europe."

But the Labour leader's main pitch was to tell voters anything other than a Labour majority risked damaging the economy, telling voters: "Don't do anything that puts this economic recovery at risk."

Mr Cameron said Mr Brown sounded "desperate" and accused him of "trying to frighten people." In his closing statement, he said Britain needed a "clean break from 13 years of failure."

Mr Clegg, who was the last to deliver a closing statement, sought to strike an optimistic note, saying "people are beginning to hope that we can do something different this time" and "if we do things differently we can be a force for good in the world."... Mr Clegg said he believed it was time for a "fundamental debate" on Europe and said "of course there are daft rules, of course it does daft things but it seems to me that we punch above our weight when you stand together in Europe."

Mr Brown said he was determined to work with the "sensible" people in Europe, and accused Mr Cameron of aligning himself with "right-wing extremists" after pulling his MEPs out of the main centre-right European People's Party grouping... Mr Clegg weighed in by accusing Mr Cameron of working with "nutters, anti-Semites, people who deny climate change exists, homophobes."

Mr Brown accused his two rivals of behaving like "my two boys at bath time - they are squabbling," gaining him the first laugh of the evening.

He went on: "I am afraid David is anti-European, Nick is anti- American. Both of them are out of touch with reality."

Imagine if our political leaders could a)- debate and b)- sound as much like bloggers as the British leaders do!