No honour if Clegg becomes Sir Nick

ARISE SIR Nick! According to reports from “party sources” – none of which have been denied – the former Lib Dem leader and Sheffield Hallam MP Nick Clegg will receive a knighthood in the New Year honours.

This is beyond astonishing. The last time Clegg hit the headlines he was skulking around Brussels with those other two Remoaners in Chief – Ken Clarke and Lord Adonis – desperately seeking to undermine the Government’s negotiating position on Brexit by encouraging the destructive obstinacy of Jean-Claude Juncker, Michel Barnier and others.

To honour someone who has consistently acted against the interests of the British people, and who seeks to thwart the will of 17.4 million voters expressed in the biggest exercise in democracy this country has ever seen, is simply extraordinary.

Of course the Remainer establishment elite will look after its own, and all the prominent campaigners who backed rule by the undemocratic and unaccountable EU will be showered with honours, despite their miserable failure.

In sharp contrast Nigel Farage – arguably the most successful politician of our era, who almost single-handedly changed the course of British and their ideological purity sullied by the messy business of actually getting things done.

So it proved with their first foray into government. Before the 2010 election, Clegg made a solemn pledge not to increase student tuition fees. Such pledges are an easy and cheap way of courting popularity, and as long as you remain in opposition you never have to do anything about them.

But once in power Clegg discovered to his horror that such rash promises have to be paid for – and after Labour’s disastrous stewardship of the economy there was “no money left”.

Clegg promptly abandoned the pledge and agreed to triple tuition fees to £9,000 – a broken promise that dogged him until the end of his political career.

In the 2015 election Clegg, narrowly survived a strong Labour challenge in his Hallam stronghold, but he quit as party leader after the Lib Dems suffered a catastrophic haemorrhaging of support – from 23 per cent of voters to under eight per cent – and its number of MPs declined from 57 to just eight.

We were told that after the 2016 referendum, there would be a massive anti-Brexit bounce as voters realised their mistake and the Lib Dems, as the only major party in England to officially oppose Brexit, would be the main beneficiary.

It didn’t happen. In the election earlier this year, there was absolutely no evidence of a surge in support for the EU, with more than 80 per cent of voters opting for solidly pro-Brexit parties – Labour and Conservative.

In fact the Lib Dems’ share of the vote actually declined even further, although thanks to the vagaries of our electoral system they managed to secure 12 seats, but Clegg himself was ousted by far left Labour candidate Jared O’Mara who went on to push the self-destruct button. Today the constituency is effectively unrepresented in Parliament.

It is an ignominious end to a political career marked by unremitting failure. Clegg failed to keep his promises in government; he failed to strengthen his party; he failed to keep his seat and he failed to keep the UK in the EU. Now, as a consolation prize for all this failure, he is honoured with a knighthood!

Well here’s an idea – Clegg claims to be a democrat so why not let the people decide? An online poll could be set up to allow citizens to vote for or against his knighthood. On second thoughts it wouldn’t work. If Clegg lost he would just demand the poll be re-run again and again until he got the answer he wanted.