Mistakes? Yes, but at least Clegg liberated Lib Dems from agony of office

ELECTORAL disaster has done wonders for Nick Clegg. Sure, he’s lost his posts as deputy prime minister and Lib Dem leader, and his party now wheezes along with only eight MPs, and in the Commons they find themselves surrounded by a vast and jeering horde of Scottish nationalists. So there has been the odd bump in the road.

Even so, it has to be said: he seems much happier than he did in May.

At the Lib Dem conference in Bournemouth he gave his first big speech since his resignation – and he looked, if not quite a changed man, then at least a rested one. Mr Clegg spent his five years as DPM gazing glumly from the Government front bench, like a dog denied dinner. Yet here he seemed keener, brighter, lighter. Powerlessness seems to have energised him. Irrelevance has acted like a tonic. He is pointless and proud.

The crowd must have helped. They loved him. He strode on stage to a standing ovation, cheers, whoops, roars and even tears. Here he is, they seemed to be saying – the hero who freed us from the shackles of power! Who liberated us from the misery of government! Who ensured that Liberal Democrats need never endure the agonies of office again!

Once Mr Clegg had finally persuaded them to stop applauding, he began with a story. The day after the election, he’d been out shopping with his son Antonio (he pronounced “Antonio” with a spectacularly theatrical Spanish twang), when a woman came up and, “with tears in her eyes”, told him how sorry she was about the election result. Humbly he thanked her for voting Lib Dem. “But I didn’t,” she said, “I voted Green!” This, said Mr Clegg, was typical of the public’s “buyer’s remorse”.

Their failure to vote Lib Dem had left them with a Tory Government they didn’t actually want.

But the main reason David Cameron had won, said Mr Clegg, was that he and George Osborne were “lucky”. And they always had been. After all, think how “lucky” they were that the 2010 election came “just after Gordon Brown had crashed the economy”.

At least, that’s what Mr Clegg told his audience. Just before he came on stage, journalists were sent the official text of Mr Clegg’s speech. That line about Gordon Brown was supposed to have been: “just after Gordon Brown had presided over the worst economic crisis in a generation”.

Interesting that Mr Clegg should make that change. “Presided over” means that Mr Brown was in office while disaster struck; “crashed” means Mr Brown caused the disaster himself. The idea that Labour caused the financial crisis was probably the Tories’ most effective attack line during the last parliament; it almost certainly helped them win this year’s election. And here was Mr Clegg, still faithfully repeating it.

Mr Clegg told his audience that he’d made “mistakes and miscalculations”. Evidently he doesn’t count this among them.