Oh Cleggy, it’s much more exciting at an undertakers
WHAT a peculiar election campaign. Yesterday gave us a party political broadcast from the Greens in the form of a boy-band video. Ukip’s Nigel Farage posed on a Grimsby trawler alongside a barely even moronic reality TV star called Joey Essex. And Labour, for its morning entertainment, descended to dog-whistle politics on foreigners’ tax, only for that policy to blow a gasket by lunchtime.
For his part, Nick Clegg was saying petrol and diesel cars should be banned within the next 25 years. No more smoking old jalopies? That’s no way to talk about Paddy Ashdown.
Almost exactly five years ago it was the height of Cleggmania, and I went to Bournemouth with Lib Dem leader Clegg. Crowds shouted his name and ran up to shake his hand. Oh cruel politics.
Yesterday I was with Mr Clegg in a marginal part of Wiltshire. The adoring masses had vanished. No one asked for selfies. He kept away from town centres – Chippenham, Melksham – and there were almost no party banners in house windows or in fields. The country seems entirely ungripped.
During the two hours I was with Mr Clegg he barely engaged a single random voter. You would find more excitement at a convention of undertakers.
Mr Clegg did talk briefly to composite engineer Craig Butler at Dymag Performance Racing Wheels. Mr Butler, 34, said afterwards that he might possibly consider voting Lib Dem.
The firm’s boss Chris Shelley, who is about to expand his workforce from ten to 250 thanks to a £7million government grant, was less glowing. He preferred not to say how he would vote. It was all very well being in the Cleggapproved European Union, said Mr Shelley, but the Germans remain fiercely protectionist. Cleggy posed with local candi- date Duncan Hames. A TV man pointed out that the election leaflets for Mr Hames contain little to no Lib Dem branding and certainly no mention of Mr Clegg. Oops. Mr Hames’s face assumed a fixed, glassy smile.
I asked Mr Hames what was being mentioned most on the doorsteps. ‘Fear of the SNP doing a deal with Labour,’ came the answer. Terror of Alex Salmond may be the one thing to have sunk into public awareness.
While Messrs Clegg and Hames held up some of the wheels made at the factory, we all did our best to avoid ‘wheels come off the Lib Dems’ gags. MR CLEGG’S word of the day was ‘lurch’. He accused Labour of lurching off to the Left and doing a possible deal with the Scots Nats, while the same thing was happening on the Right with the Tories and Ukip.
For any Con-Ukip coalition to happen, Ukip need to win a big bag of seats. Is this likely to happen? Or was Mr Clegg being disingenuous? Heaven forbid. We drove to the pretty village of Holt, where our hero was due to meet local Lib Dem activists.
A safe crowd. Not likely to bite. Not with those dentures.
Twenty genteel folk, several hobbling, gave a little warble of relief when Mr Clegg hove into view. They were all standing in the tiny garden of a cottage garden which turned out to be Mr Hames’s property. The photographers trampled all over the primroses and aubretia.
Tourist Jude Carter, with her children Erin, six, and Ted, five, spotted Mr Clegg striding down a path. ‘Oh, look, that man’s quite famous,’ Mrs Carter told her youngsters. Mr Clegg shook her hand. Young Ted recoiled in terror.
And that was pretty much that as far as meeting voters went.
To complete his day’s exertions, Mr Clegg and his entourage visited the Go Ape adventure centre at Haldon Forest Park near Exeter, Devon, where they indulged in some R&R: climbing up trees, walking across rope bridges and whizzing down zipwires. Wheee! We did once have a deputy prime minister nicknamed Tarzan but I don’t think even he would have gone in for quite this sort of silliness.
Last night Mr Clegg and his wife Miriam (she’s the one who ‘doesn’t do political stunts’) gave an interview to ITV’s Tom Bradby. Cue more gooey shots of politicians talking about their domestic arrangements.
Meanwhile, in the real world, jobs are up, the EU is in crisis and Islamic State is still chopping people’s heads off. I wonder what Joey Essex would make of all that.