Just when you thought Clegg couldn't blunder any further, he starts channelling Ian Davidson

I see that Nick Clegg has had a little moan about Alex Salmond wanting to "have another crack" at the independence referendum (even though, to the best of my knowledge, no-one in the SNP leadership has proposed an early second referendum unless circumstances change), and in a disturbing echo of Ian Davidson's notorious "bayoneting the wounded" comment, has compared the outgoing First Minister to a Japanese soldier who doesn't know the war is over.

Let me put a thought to you, Mr Clegg.  You are Deputy Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, with special responsibility for constitutional reform.  I'm not entirely clear what you've been doing in that role for the last four-and-a-half years, given that I can't actually think of a meaningful constitutional reform that has occurred over that period.  But you nevertheless have an opportunity to redeem yourself now by implementing the solemn promises that secured a narrow (rather than a "pretty emphatic") win for the No side.  Once you've done that, you're then perfectly entitled to enter into a discussion with the people of Scotland about whether or not a second referendum would be appropriate.

Just to remind you, the promises you need to deliver are -

"Devo SUPER Max."  (Devo Max is the devolution of virtually all powers other than foreign affairs and defence.  It's unclear what the 'SUPER' refers to, but presumably it must somehow be even more impressive than Devo Max.)

"A modern form of Scottish Home Rule."  (See above.)

"Near federalism."  (See above.)

The guarantee of Scotland remaining within the European Union.  (This is not consistent with briefing journalists that your party will concede an in/out referendum on the EU in order to stay in coalition with the Tories after the next election.)

"The Scottish Parliament is permanent."  (This means abandoning the doctrine of absolute Westminster sovereignty, and irrevocably surrendering London's right to legislate on devolved matters unless given permission to do so by Edinburgh.)

So you get on with that little lot, Nick, and once it's all signed, sealed and delivered, you'll be in a splendid position to make the case that a repeat referendum would be totally inappropriate for the foreseeable future.  But if you fail to deliver, then quite simply you have no mandate, because the mandate received by the No campaign on September 18th was firmly tied to a "vow".  In those circumstances, I'm afraid that whether we should at some point "have another crack" will quite rightly remain an open question.

Oh, and given that the Lib Dems are on 5% in YouGov's latest Scottish subsample, and the SNP are on 49%, it's just possible that opinions may vary about which political leader most closely resembles a deluded Japanese soldier who has failed to recognise that the game is up.

Concerns raised over Ipsos-Mori's methodology

An anonymous poster left this rather troubling comment on last night's post about polling accuracy -

"James this is an excellent article and has prompted me to share with you my own personal experience.

I had never been polled before but in September I was contacted by Ipsos Mori. On paper I should be a No voter, retired professional, own my house, good company pension etc.

After being asked if I would take part in the poll, I was then asked if they could contact me on a regular basis as they wanted to follow trends.

After two or three very leading questions, one of which started "since Scotland would not be admitted to the EU", I was then asked "if the referendum was tomorrow how would you vote" answer Yes. "How likely are you to vote" answer definitely.

After a few other questions the interviewer thanked me for my time then finished the call.

I have never heard back from Ipsos Mori, I wonder why?"

Now, to be fair, it's possible that this was an unpublished internal poll for the No campaign or for one of the anti-independence parties. If so, there's no problem at all - if Better Together are daft enough to use leading questions to convince themselves that they're doing better than they really are, then by all means let them get on with it. But there was in fact a published Ipsos-Mori referendum poll that was conducted between the 9th and 15th of September last year. There was no suggestion at the time that any questions (let alone leading questions) were asked before the main referendum question, and if there had been it would have completely transformed our perception of the results - look at the way Professor John Curtice castigated the Panelbase poll just one month earlier that had asked the referendum question third.

Because this was a telephone poll, one theoretical possibility is that one or more rogue interviewers were asking the questions in the wrong sequence, and thus potentially distorting the results. It's not entirely paranoid of us to raise these doubts, because as things stand Ipsos-Mori are the extreme outliers in this campaign, and that must be happening for a reason (or for a variety of reasons). The other slightly mysterious thing about them is that they did actually produce one poll that was very good for the Yes side, way back in early 2012. That was followed by a huge slump for Yes over the course of the rest of the year, from which there hasn't really been a proper recovery in any subsequent Ipsos-Mori poll. No other pollster has replicated that trend. The only one that has even come close is TNS-BMRB, but unlike Ipsos-Mori they've shown Yes making a very telling recovery from the low point of the initial slump.

It's very difficult to explain this divergence from the general pattern, given that as far as we know Ipsos-Mori haven't altered their methodology since that early 2012 poll. So if anyone else has been interviewed by them, feel free to let us know your own experience. Were you contacted on your landline phone, or on your mobile? Was the referendum question asked first? If not, could the earlier questions be construed as in any way leading? Was there a preamble to the referendum question, and if so, what was it?

UPDATE : I've been contacted by someone else who was interviewed by Ipsos-Mori more recently. He asked to be anonymised, so I've excluded his postcode and a few other details that might conceivably be personally identifying. In some ways it's quite a similar account to the one above, but crucially there's no indication this time of any leading questions being asked prior to the referendum question. There's still no sign of anyone having been contacted by Ipsos-Mori on their mobile phone. That's important, because if they aren't calling mobiles it's hard to see how they can be confident that their sampling isn't significantly skewed.

"Firstly, thank you for your excellent blog, which has helped me to come to a dim appreciation of some of the complexities of opinion polls. I'm stimulated to contact you as a result of reading your post this morning, with details of a reader who contacted you with details of his experience with IPSOS-MORI.

I have to say that I can echo that experience. I was contacted by them by telephone (my landline) earlier this year - I would guess around 6 to 8 weeks ago, but add a significant plus or minus on either side of that. I was asked a similar set of question (no leading comments re the EU, but was asked my voting intention, which is Yes, and my likelihood of voting, which is certain). The final question which I was asked related to age - when I said that I was **, I was told that their quota...was filled, and that they could go no further with questions. I was asked if I would be happy to be contacted for future polls, and answered yes, but no further contact has been made to date.

Interestingly, I fall into the same demographic as your other correspondent...I live in a fairly affluent area...and guess I should be a right of centre No voter (neither of which tags describes me!). I don't know if these two anecdotal reports have any significance, but it seemed worth giving you this information."

If you scroll down to the comments section, you can also find an interesting comment from an ex-Mori interviewer.

* * *

I did actually manage to make it through the whole of Clegg v Farage this time, but as someone with pro-European views it was a profoundly depressing experience to have as my supposed "champion" a politician as unappealing and insufferably condescending as Nick Clegg. I'll be honest - he was so dreadful that it got to the point where I was more or less cheering on Farage. In retrospect, it's hard to understand why the public didn't see straight through Clegg in the 2010 leaders' debates, because his style hasn't changed one iota - it must have been a very weird kind of novelty value.

Instead of treating us like adult human beings and saying "that's because of the Lisbon Treaty", he'll say "that's because of something called the Lisbon Treaty, which is...", before proceeding with a patient explanation in words of no more than one syllable for his very favourite little girl Hannah, who asked such a clever question. In fact, I almost expected him to say : "That's a really important question, Hannah, and I'm going to answer it for you with what we call 'words'. Those are really cool things that we use to make up a sentence..."

You won't be surprised to hear that the bit that made the most steam come out of my ears was when Clegg abused the platform he'd been given by embarking on an anti-independence rant. Dimbleby did eventually close down the topic, but he waited far, far too long - it felt like a good thirty seconds went by. And even then, the way he did it was totally unsatisfactory - he seemed to imply he was only shutting Clegg up because independence was a rather tiresome subject. Instead, he should have said this -

"Nick, stop. This isn't on. You know perfectly well that there is no representative here from the pro-independence campaign to put the alternative point of view. The reason they aren't here is that they weren't invited. The reason they weren't invited is that independence isn't on the agenda for discussion tonight. So it's inappropriate for you to raise it, and I'd ask you not to do it again."

The point being of course that Clegg knew full well that he was chancing his arm, and if other anti-independence politicians are to be deterred from doing the same on network TV they need to know they'll be clearly 'punished' by having their transgression flagged up for viewers. A moderator half-heartedly changing the subject after the damage has already been done just isn't good enough.

Interestingly, the BBC's own guidelines call on presenters to effectively slap down politicians who try to slip in a sly anti-independence dig in interviews related to other topics. Those guidelines won't officially come into force until late May, but Dimbleby's performance tonight doesn't fill me with confidence that they'll ever be properly implemented.

The non-apology that speaks to the cynicism at the heart of modern Westminster politics

Once upon a time, Tony Blair offered this trademark piece of creative ambiguity to the Labour conference -

"And the problem is I can apologise for the information that turned out to be wrong, but I can't, sincerely at least, apologise for removing Saddam."

Now if we'd had a Leader of the Opposition worthy of the name, the first question that would have been asked of Blair when parliament reconvened was : "when you say you 'can' apologise for the information on WMDs being wrong, does that mean you are in fact apologising, that you're physically capable of apologising if you wished but you're not actually going to, or something else entirely?" I mean, I "can" play In an English Country Garden on the recorder, but I've no intention of doing so today. Impossible as it seems, though, the cynicism of the Blair non-apology has just been effortlessly surpassed by the current Deputy Prime Minister.

I was genuinely gobsmacked and dismayed in 2010 when Lib Dem apologists for the coalition reacted to the betrayal over tuition fees by suggesting that a stupid mistake had been made - but that the mistake had not been to break the promise, but to make it in the first place. Does honour have no part to play in modern Westminster politics? It seems not - the philosophy is that it's best not to make any watertight promises at all, because every non-cretin knows that you'll just have to break them, and that you'll become very unpopular as a result.

I might have regained a modicum of respect for Clegg if he had proved better than his cheerleaders, and had made the appropriate and honourable apology for tuition fees - namely an apology for breaking the promise, rather than for making it. But oh no. Instead we were treated to yet more drivel about the supposed utter impossibility of the pledge ever being kept. Well, that's odd, because the promise (which was practically signed in blood) was not in fact to guarantee that a rise in tuition fees would be blocked, or to change the minds of anyone in the Labour or the Conservative parties. It was much more narrow than that - it was simply a guarantee that Liberal Democrat MPs would vote against any increase in fees. There may be many things in this world that Liberal Democrat MPs cannot control (thankfully), but how they themselves cast their votes in parliament is not one of them. It simply requires walking through a door. Were you really not "absolutely sure you could deliver" your own MPs through a door, Nick?

I'm beginning to wonder if he can even deliver the milk.

Panelbase poll : independence trails by just six points

Thanks once again to Marcia for alerting me to the latest highly encouraging poll on voting intentions for the independence referendum, which shows the No side in a slender six-point lead...

Yes 47%
No 53%

The poll also confirms the SNP's current commanding position in respect of Holyrood voting intentions - the party leads Labour by 50% to 29%. For a point of reference, a survey by the same company just a month before the SNP landslide last spring had the nationalists at 37%, tied with Labour on the constituency vote.

As we know, Nick Clegg is an expert in "extremism", so perhaps he'll want to reflect at some leisure on which two party leaders find themselves on the respective extremes of popularity and unpopularity in this poll.

I'll give you three guesses.

* * *

I suggested two or three weeks ago that the broadcasters would need to urgently rethink their whole approach in the run-up to the independence referendum. Well, if the Alex Salmond/Calcutta Cup incident is anything to go by, it appears they've done just that - and come to the intriguing conclusion that there are simply far too many pro-independence voices on TV.

The mind boggles. Try again, chaps.

Careful, Nick : automatic recourse to 'moderation' might just lead you to Calamity

I just happened to stumble across an excellent blogpost the other day detailing the most common logical fallacies. The examples used to illustrate each fallacy all relate to the bogus arguments deployed by proponents of a legal ban on sex work and/or pornography, but it was a very timely find given Nick Clegg's bizarre attempt to paint the huge number of people who believe in either independence or the status quo as 'extremists' -

"Mr Clegg said the Lib Dems vision of Home Rule represented the views of the Scottish people and argued that those who were for independence, or keeping the current constitutional settlement, were extremists.

“All the evidence suggests that is the mainstream of opinion and the extremists are those who either think that we need to yank Scotland out of the United Kingdom tomorrow, or those who say there should be no further change at all,” Mr Clegg said."

One of the fallacies explained in the blogpost is "Middle ground: the belief that the truth must be somewhere in the middle". Off the top of my head, here's an example...

Proposition 1 - Nick Clegg should be sentenced to thirty years' hard labour for fraudulently securing votes on the promise that the Liberal Democrats would vote against an increase in tuition fees.

Proposition 2 - Nick Clegg should be spared jail for fraudulently securing votes on the promise that the Liberal Democrats would vote against an increase in tuition fees, but should certainly be expected to resign forthwith.

Proposition 3 - Nick Clegg should be forgiven for fradulently securing votes on the promise that the Liberal Democrats would vote against an increase in tuition fees, and allowed to remain as Lib Dem leader for now.

In this instance, hard labour and forgiveness are clearly the 'extreme' options, which leaves resignation as the only moderate, reasonable, sensible course of action. And as Clegg is apparently keen to pray in aid the relative popularity of each constitutional option, it should also be noted that calls for his resignation represent 'mainstream opinion' in Scotland. Open and shut case, methinks - anyone who doesn't think Nick Clegg should resign immediately is clearly an extremist on a par with Nick Griffin.

Incidentally, I was intrigued to see in the Scotsman article that Clegg defines himself (rather like Ken Macintosh) as a 'devolutionist, not a unionist'. But at the Political Innovation conference just over a year ago, I clearly remember Caron Lindsay repeatedly insisting that the Lib Dems are a 'federalist, not a unionist' party. Whatever happened to that? Federalism and devolution are qualitatively very different concepts - albeit both very much unionist ones in the literal sense of the word.

An attempt to spread democracy to that unlikeliest of places : the United Kingdom

Thought I'd give a quick plug to an Unlock Democracy petition I've just signed calling on the coalition government to deliver an elected second chamber within the lifetime of this parliament. Although Nick Clegg recently unveiled plans to do just that, there have been a lot of mutterings from the usual suspects suggesting that there isn't a cat in hell's chance of it actually happening, because nobody cares about the subject and it's all far too difficult anyway. There have also been siren voices telling the Lib Dems that they can't afford to preoccupy themselves with 'process' anymore, and need to focus on (if you'll forgive the phrase) the things that really matter. So any small steps that we can take to stiffen their resolve can't do any harm - after all, try telling gay men that 'process' doesn't matter when it was the Lords who blocked equality before the law in the 1990s, on the basis of no popular mandate whatsoever. It's high time the UK was dragged kicking and screaming into joining the rest of Western Europe in the democratic age.

If you'd like to sign the petition, it can be found here.

Is this the unanswerable case for SNP involvement in the next round of UK leaders' debates?

Well done to Stewart Stevenson MSP for spotting this incredible statistic -

"SNP now have 77 elected Parliamentarians, same as LibDems - Scot/Wales/UK/EU LD=5/5/55/12 SNP=69/0/6/2"

There's a slight error there, because the Liberal Democrats actually have 57 seats at Westminster. Nevertheless, if you take the SNP and their sister party Plaid Cymru together, they are clearly ahead of the Lib Dems by 92 to 79, which I would have thought is the final nail in the coffin of any notion that the Lib Dems have a 'national' presence that gives them a special entitlement to participation in televised general election debates that the nationalist parties do not share.

Of course the SNP shouldn't even need to pray in aid their strength in the Scottish or European Parliaments - their established position in Westminster politics ought to be reason enough. They have had continuous parliamentary representation since 1967, and are comfortably beyond the threshold of seats that affords official recognition as a Westminster parliamentary party. They outpolled both the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats in one of the four constituent parts of the United Kingdom at the last election (in spite of the debates being rigged against them), and won more seats than the Conservatives. They also stood in 59 constituencies - two more than the number of seats that were required for Nick Clegg to become Deputy Prime Minister. And, of course, just like two of the three parties that actually did feature in the 2010 debates, they are a 'territorial' party, rather than a UK-wide one. However, if these facts aren't enough, the SNP's thorough-going dominance of the Scottish political scene over the next five years is going to make their total exclusion from the debates look ever more ludicrous.

A toast to Nick Clegg, the accidental midwife of Scotland's independence referendum

I have a kind of cherished personal memory of the moment on 2005 general election night when it suddenly dawned on me that the unfolding result was almost ideal for the SNP. That would have seemed a peculiar thing to say out loud at the time - in spite of a couple of constituency gains, Alex Salmond's resumption of the leadership had failed to prevent the party recording its lowest share of the vote since 1987, and unexpectedly slipping behind the Liberal Democrats on the popular vote for the first time since the same year. The political X Factor everyone was marvelling at in Scotland was not the Alex Salmond Factor, but the Charles Kennedy Factor. However, as we all know, Scottish Parliament elections are a very different proposition, and looking ahead two years it just seemed to me that a perfect storm was brewing. By the time of the 2007 Holyrood vote, a tired UK Labour government would be bang in the middle of its third term, with the SNP the obvious recipient of any protest vote. Better still, Labour had done just about well enough in 2005 to make it likely that Tony Blair, weighed down by the baggage of Iraq, would still be in harness as Prime Minister. And of course that's exactly how it all played out - the timing really couldn't have been better. If Blair had called it a day even a few weeks earlier than he did, the 2007 election would have been fought in the midst of a Brown honeymoon, and it seems likely that Labour would have clung on to power.

But while my crystal ball was almost uncannily accurate in 2005, I must admit it couldn't have been more faulty in 2010. I'd been convinced all along that, once again, the SNP's Holyrood hopes hinged almost entirely upon Labour somehow clinging on to power at Westminster. It seemed obvious that with (to coin a phrase) "the Tories back", many of the disgruntled 2007 switchers would revert to the Labour fold in 2011. On that fateful day in May that began with expectations of a Labour-Lib Dem deal, but ended with David Cameron walking up the steps of Downing Street, I felt a sense of hopelessness welling up inside me twice over - firstly because I quite simply despaired at the thought of a Tory-led government, and secondly because it seemed to me that the SNP's period in office was about to draw to a close through no fault of their own. I dearly hoped I was wrong - but the opinion polls in subsequent months followed a depressingly predictable pattern.

Yet here we are a year later with - almost unbelievably - an SNP majority government in place, and with the benefit of hindsight it's now clear that, just like 2005, the cards dealt by the 2010 general election prepared the ground for that outcome in almost ideal fashion. With either a Tory or a Labour majority at Westminster, the shift of the Lib Dem vote en masse to the SNP would never have happened. With a Labour/Lib Dem coalition, any backlash against Nick Clegg's party may well have seen a lot of the votes move in the obvious anti-Labour direction of the Tories. There was of course a direct swing from Labour to SNP on Thursday anyway, so perhaps a second term for Alex Salmond would still have been on the cards without Lib Dem assistance. But would there have been anything like 69 SNP seats if Clegg hadn't fallen for Cameron's charms twelve months ago? I doubt it.

So here's to you, Nick. You made a catastrophic decision, but just as Margaret Thatcher was the unwitting midwife of Scottish Home Rule, so it appears the hapless federal Lib Dem leader is the midwife of the independence referendum that so many thought could never happen.

I agree with Nick (first time in a year) : Salmond should be involved in 'national' TV leaders' debates

From the Independent on Sunday :

"After emerging victorious from the TV debates last year, Clegg has been imagining a leaders' broadcast on the referendum. "So, on one side of the stage, pro-AV, you'd have me, Ed Miliband, (Green) Caroline Lucas, (Ukip) Nigel Farage, (SNP) Alex Salmond and (Plaid Cymru) Ieuan Wyn Jones.""

Not to worry that it hasn't come to pass this time, Nick - we'll be on hand to remind you of your very fair-minded suggestion for a leaders' debate line-up when the next Westminster general election comes round...

Sizzlingly sexy slogans for a bigger, better, brighter tomorrow

I was relieved to discover via Caron Lindsay that most rank-and-file Lib Dems have enough sense to be distinctly unimpressed by Nick Clegg's weird new slogan "Alarm Clock Britain". My own problem with it is not so much that it's patronising or offensive - more that it's utterly meaningless. OK, I know it probably has some spurious logic to it, but any three word slogan that requires a three hundred word explanatory note has got a flaw. It's the political soundbite equivalent of abstract modern art.

Anyway, if we've got to the point where slogans don't have to make any immediate sense, but do have to involve a) everyday activities or familiar objects and b) the name of a country or location, here are a few helpful suggestions for any political strategists out there -

Electric Razor Scotland

Hot Toddy Wales

Lemsip Max London

Wheelie-Bin Aberdeenshire

Event Planner Israel

Stubborn Stain Senegal

Fountain Pen Saudi Arabia

Sleigh-Ride Paraguay

Unexpected Puddle Poland

Involuntary Bungee Jump Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia

Caron mentions in a comment on another blog that the only slogan she can think of worse than "Alarm Clock Britain" is "Have You Got the Guts to Vote SDP?". But I'd have thought the latter was the stuff of genius, brilliantly preparing the ground for the inevitable moment in the post-election press conference when Dr Owen shrugged his shoulders and said - "Well, don't look at me. Didn't have the guts, did they?"

Fresh hopes for modest electoral reform at Westminster

The conventional wisdom that the 'No' side are coasting to victory in the AV referendum has been blown apart by a new ICM survey that shows 'Yes' ahead by 35% to 22%. Whether or not these figures are any more credible than the YouGov ones showing the opposite picture, one thing that does seem eminently plausible is the huge number of 'don't knows' at this stage on an issue about which there has been very little publicity so far. The referendum is therefore wide open and out there to be won by either side.

My suspicion is that, with the current toxicity of Nick Clegg's party, the more non-Liberal Democrats become openly associated with the Yes campaign (and do so for their own reasons) the greater the chances of success. It will be fatal for it to be seen as a Lib Dem baby. I also firmly believe it's vital that Yes campaigners don't give in to the temptation to say that AV must be allowed to 'bed in' before any further changes to the electoral system are considered - the danger that supporters of PR will feel uninspired by the prospect of this timid reform far outweighs the need to reassure others who might fear they are voting for the thin end of the wedge. The latter group are scarcely natural Yes voters in any case.

Furthermore, establishing a narrative well in advance of polling day that (whether Clegg and Cameron like it or not) a 'Yes' is a vote for the first small step in a process of electoral reform will make it much easier for PR supporters to build on any victory afterwards. So it's the right strategy twice over.

Labour's AV alibi, gift-wrapped by Nick Clegg

Prompted by Andy Burnham's declaration that Labour will be giving next year's AV referendum no priority at all, John Rentoul has written what strikes me as a too-clever-by-half article that 'records the demise' of electoral reform. The most peculiar line is this -

"many Labour supporters have since decided that it is a bad idea by the simple equation: electoral reform means coalitions and Labour does not like this coalition"

Which is then flatly contradicted by this observation just four paragraphs later -

"what AV is not: it is not a proportional system"

Precisely. Which (unfortunately) means that it would not make coalitions any more or less likely than at present. If Labour MPs really are in a mind to rage against literally any system that can throw up the arithmetic for a coalition, then clearly they should be seeking to do away with first-past-the-post forthwith, because it is that, not AV, which has contrived to produce the current government.

And, for what it's worth, I think the rumours Rentoul is spreading of the death of the patient are greatly exaggerated in any case. There are any number of examples that demonstrate the far greater volatility of the electorate when faced with a referendum question - the Common Market vote in 1975 is the best-known example, but the more recent Northeast of England Assembly referendum produced an equally startling turnaround in the final stages. With YouGov showing an eleven-point lead for the No side, let's say I'm 'cautious pessimistic' about the outcome - but the arguments haven't even begun to be seriously put before the electorate yet. To pronounce the result a foregone conclusion at this stage is risible.

What is fair to say, however, is that not only was Clegg's desire to hold the vote on the same day as the devolved elections a cynical and disrespectful tactical manoeuvre, it's also proving to be spectacularly counter-productive - as Burnham's comment demonstrates, it's delivered to Labour a gift-wrapped alibi for not engaging in the campaign.

Clegg's imperfect choice was for long-term irrelevance

Via Liberal Democrat Voice, I came across this extraordinary defence of the party's conduct in government from Julian Glover in the Guardian -

"Riled, Lib Dems are making a poor job of defending themselves. They are embarrassed to speak confidently – not so much because of the deal they did, better than anyone guessed before the election, but because they never presented themselves as deal-makers. Instead, they presented themselves as tellers of fantastical truths, signing pledges on tuition fees the leadership never thought they’d need to return to. That was the worst of the Lib Dems: indulging an unworkable policy that amounted to an unaffordable middle-class subsidy dressed up as principle.

Some of the voters won over by such things are angry. Many have decided to support Labour instead. Fair enough: many Lib Dem voters – and many members too – were content with the perfection of irrelevance. Clegg, though, is dealing with the imperfection of power."

To translate roughly : if you're caught bang to rights breaking a straightforward and solemn election pledge, the immaturity lies not in the breach of trust, but in having made the pledge in the first place. Reading that, is it any wonder that the public are so cynical about the values of the political class?

As far as the Lib Dems' previous stance on tuition fees being 'unworkable' is concerned, it's only unworkable if you happen to be in coalition with a party that for ideological reasons could never make the tough choices that would make it workable. Moreover, it's a little too convenient to gloss over the crucial distinction here - a compromise on the pledge to abolish tuition fees within six years is the sort of thing the public could easily have accepted as reasonable in the forging of a coalition. But the bit of the pledge that was almost literally signed in blood - and thus should have been regarded as utterly sacred - was the promise to actively vote against any increase in the fees. Whether Glover cares to acknowledge it or not, that was scarcely undoable if the will (not to mention the integrity) had been there.

And what about 'irrelevance'? By signing up for the coalition without a referendum on even the weakest form of proportional representation, Clegg was consciously accepting the likelihood of continued irrelevance for his party in exchange for his own day in the sun. A majoritarian voting system delivered sixty-five years of single-party Labour or Tory rule until this current blip - that ought to give even the most myopic Lib Dems pause for thought about the long-term consequences of having settled for the prospect of another majoritarian voting system.

Cracking down on the undeserving under-threes

In his now notorious Newsnight interview a couple of nights ago, Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt explained that people were in no way being penalised for having large families, but were instead simply being asked to take "responsibility" for their own "choices", as opposed to expecting the state to finance those choices. Of course by definition the majority of people in large families - and who are thus directly affected by the new cap on household benefits - are children. So let's recap on how Hunt's logic applies to them :

1) Children choose to be born.

2) Children choose to be born into large rather than small families.

3) Children choose to be born into welfare-dependent households.

4) Children choose to have a single parent who earns £44,000 (thus disqualifying them from child benefit) rather than two parents who earn £87,000 between them.

5) Children must take full responsibility for all of these free choices, rather than expecting the taxpayer to finance them.

Well, I'm sure I speak for us all when I say - take a bow, Mr Hunt. And you too, Nick "Conscience of the Coalition" Clegg, for making it all possible. The decent, hard-working, law-abiding majority in this country have been bled dry by these wastrel toddlers for far too long. They neither work nor want.

Child benefit : is Clegg the new Macavity?

Liberal Democrat blogger Caron rightly expresses her irritation that the cut in child benefit was announced at the Conservative party conference, rather than to parliament. But it begs the obvious question - what did the Tories actually have to gain from doing it this way? Surely you save your conference speech 'rabbits out of the hat' for things that are actually going to be popular with the electorate? Apart from anything else, it conveniently lets the Liberal Democrats off the hook. Since the coalition was formed, the Tories have gone out of their way to ensure that the Lib Dems were fully locked into the cuts narrative, with it being left to David Laws (remember him?) to itemise the early 'savings' with ill-disguised relish. But tonight, the only questions seemingly being asked are how this Tory cut will play with the Tory-leaning electorate, and how the Tory rank-and-file feel about it.

A cynic might almost suspect that this was a deal cooked up between Clegg and Cameron - you can have your cut, but this time you can take the (initial) heat for it yourself. If so, there are of course only so many times that trick can be pulled before Clegg starts to take on an old mantle of Gordon Brown's - as this government's "Macavity".

*

Iain Martin on Newsnight : "the Tories have forgotten where the middle is".

Now, there are a great many reasons why abandoning universal child benefit may be extremely unwise, but one of them is not that a £45,000+ salary for an individual somehow represents a "middle income". Memo to all politicians - please feel free to "forget" things that aren't actually true. Regardless of the best efforts of right-wing hacks to "remind" you of them later on.

Will the AV campaign herald a severe bout of Lib Dem wistfulness?

Although on the face of it the most dramatic moment in Ed Miliband's speech was his comment on Iraq, and more particularly the bizarre exchange it triggered between David Miliband and Harriet Harman, perhaps of much longer-term significance was the almost throwaway confirmation that the new Labour leader would be supporting a Yes vote in the forthcoming AV referendum. There had been a growing sense that the battle for this very minor reform of the voting system was on the way to being lost, but to some extent that was based on the assumption that Labour were happy to sabotage the campaign now that they were no longer directing it. The prospect of a Yes campaign encompassing both the Liberal Democrats and a fresh Labour leader who may very well still be enjoying a political honeymoon perhaps tilts the probabilities back to a positive outcome.

All the same, the more thoughtful Liberal Democrats will surely be reflecting tonight on their party's short-sightedness back in May. One of the main excuses for refusing to seriously investigate a progressive alternative to a Tory-led coalition was that it was unthinkable to countenance allowing Gordon Brown to remain in office, even for a brief period. That might have seemed to make sense in the feverish atmosphere of the moment - but the perspective changes considerably now that we've reached the point by which Brown would already have been gone. For the avoidance of four short months of discomfort, the Liberal Democrats now face the prospect of having to endure four-and-a-half more years of coalition with a party that the majority of members will increasingly regard as very obviously the 'wrong' partner. To say that the ad hoc alliance between Clegg and Miliband to push for modest electoral reform is likely to make the Lib Dem rank-and-file feel a touch wistful is something of an understatement.

Marriages are often blown apart by a yearning for the greener grass on the other side - could the same thing happen to the Lib Dems and Tories over the next two or three years? Intriguingly, Ed Miliband himself doesn't seem to think so, with indications that he's digging in for the full five year long-haul. He may of course be right, but it's far from a certainty.

One 'mistake' that a senior UK minister has correctly identified

Much as Nick Clegg isn't exactly going to be my nominee for Man of the Year, there was something symbolically rather satisfying about finally seeing a senior UK government minister stand at the dispatch box and unequivocally declare the invasion of Iraq "illegal". Spain had its 'purging' election in 2004 when the enthusiastic Bush cheerleader Aznar was ousted by Zapatero, and even the US itself eventually elected an opponent of the Iraq war as President. But it appeared that the British electorate were never going to have the opportunity to express their disgust at the events of 2003 in such a clear-cut way, due to the complicity between the Labour and Tory leaderships over the issue. Probably what happened today was just about the best we could ever realistically hope for.

And George Osborne and William Hague's faces when Clegg said the words were an absolute picture. They had obviously built themselves up to nod their heads furiously and shout "Hear, hear!" regardless of what Clegg said during PMQs, and they didn't quite manage to pull out of their approving facial expressions in time.

Public opinion? Nick's phoned his mates to find out...

Nick Clegg's response to the anger over his decision to hold the AV referendum on the same day as the Holyrood poll, made without any consultation whatsoever -

"I really struggle to understand why the extensive and wide-ranging debates about the future of Scotland, about the Government of Scotland, the politics of Holyrood would in any way be subsumed or overshadowed or overturned by a separate, very, very clear, simple yes or no vote on how in future people vote for their MPs...

I am genuinely trying to work out what the allegation is. I speak to friends of mine who will be voting in Scotland and they say they see no complexity at all."

Hmmm. Wouldn't it be a wizard idea to also check with a few people who aren't his friends, and therefore aren't 100% guaranteed to tell him exactly what he wants to hear? For all I know the answer might be no different, but I'd have thought it would be a worthwhile exercise all the same, just to be on the safe side. After all, the last time the concept of Scottish public opinion was mixed up with "whatever the minister's mates think" the government managed to convince themselves that the poll tax was a really popular idea in these parts.

The Lib Dems' strategic blunder means that the coalition is more likely to be an aberration than a new dawn

"Coalitions are here to stay," declares Nick Clegg, leaving me scratching my head slightly. Now, if the Lib Dems had done what they should have done in the coalition negotiations and held out for nothing short of AV+, it would have been a perfectly reasonable boast. But AV on its own - and it really is jaw-dropping how large swathes of the media have spectacularly failed to cotton on to this simple fact - is not a proportional voting system, and does not in itself make coalitions any more likely. Indeed, in circumstances where the two largest parties occupy the centre ground and the smaller parties hold more radical positions (as in Australia), it can actually entrench the duopoly, and make single-party government even more likely than it would have been under first-past-the-post.

What the Lib Dems are banking on, of course, is that as a centre party they are well-placed to be "everyone's second choice" and thus make significant gains under AV. Along with making a renewed coalition more likely, those extra seats will, the theory goes, create a bridgehead from which the prize of proper electoral reform can be pushed for. But the paradox is that, as a direct consequence of entering government with the Tories, the Lib Dems' first preference vote has now utterly collapsed in the opinion polls. Unless they can reverse that trend, it will more than offset any boost they might receive from a switch to AV, and the net effect will be that future coalitions and electoral reforms have been made somewhat less probable by the Lib Dems' deal with the Tories, not more so.

Hung parliaments under first-past-the-post have tended to be a bit like solar eclipses - they occur extraordinarly rarely, and when they do it's not necessarily at a time that will suit. Yet, because they represent the third party's only golden opportunity to reform the electoral system, the moment has to be seized with both hands whenever it does crop up, otherwise that party will just condemn itself by default to a few more decades out of power. The FPTP neanderthals in the Tory ranks (not to mention the Tom Bradby ranks) seemed to instinctively sense that such a pivotal moment was upon us earlier this year, hence the hysterical attempts in the run-up to the election to weave the apocalyptic narrative that, during an economic crisis, it was not the moment to be "irresponsibly" focusing on changing the electoral system, and that no-one would ever forgive the Liberal Democrats if they did so. But, hang on - wasn't the last hung parliament election in 1974 also a "moment of crisis"? Indeed, couldn't the same have been said to some extent of other close elections, like 1979 and 1992? The message to the Liberals has invariably been : there's always tomorrow to think about fair votes, and tomorrow is never more than a few decades away.

By settling for a referendum on a voting system that no-one really wants (except, ironically, parts of the Labour party) the Lib Dems have just flunked their - and our - golden chance yet again. Next try in 2037?

Love is proving blind for some Tories

Reading through the comments on this post on ConservativeHome about the possibility of the Liberal Democrats pulling the plug on the coalition, it suddenly struck me just how far some Conservative supporters have fallen in love with the idea of the leading Lib Dems being their ideological soulmates - and of course there's nothing like the intensity of a passion that breaks into the open after being suppressed for so long. But I fear the infatuation may be causing these Tory posters to lose their sense of perspective somewhat on where the Liberal Democrat ministers' ultimate loyalties lie. (The same phenomenon has been on open display at Political Betting for weeks.) They seem to take it as a given that the Clegg/Laws wing of the party wouldn't think twice about sticking with the coalition, even if it meant the party rupturing and the left flank breaking off, either to join forces with Labour, or to form an independent social liberal alternative to both the coalition and Labour.

It seems to me that only a Tory could possibly feel that senior Lib Dems' loyalty to the coalition is - and ought to be - stronger than their loyalty to the integrity and future viability of their own party. I have no doubt Nick Clegg is philosophically very close to the Tories and desperately wants to see out the coalition's five-year term if at all possible - but on the other hand I doubt if he's keen on being the Lib Dems' Ramsay MacDonald or David Owen. If he was, he'd hardly have stuck so scrupulously to the party's laborious internal procedures during the coalition negotiations - in spite of the likes of Paddy Ashdown earlier branding them unimportant.

If the grass roots of the Lib Dems and a large chunk of the parliamentary party force Nick Clegg to choose between them and a realignment of the centre-right in British politics, I suspect (and, admittedly, hope) there'll only be one possible answer.