Bernard Ingham: To save his party Clegg must do his duty

Wales has a minority Labour government which wants more powers – and no doubt more English cash – to complete the wrecking of the Principality, not least by industrialising its rural beauty with useless wind farms.

Scotland has a Nationalist government led by that bladder of haggis, Alex Salmond, who will effectively deter the tartan whingers from voting for independence by continuing to bribe them royally with English money. Where will they get a better deal? Not in Brussels.

Labour, routed in Scotland and unable to make much headway in England against the Tories, remains as vacant as ever over what it stands for. Shadow Minister, Ivan Lewis, bleakly sees it as standing for “the North, benefit claimants and immigrants” and as an over-spender that does not secure value for money. Why vote for that?

As for the Liberal Democrats, they are being stripped of their pretence.

Most of them are proving, as we always suspected, to be crypto-socialists who have at last lost their ability to be all things to all men at all times and in all places by having their bluff called by the responsibilities of office.

Nick Clegg has gone from Top of the Pops to the dregs in 12 swift months. He has become a public whipping post and some, perhaps especially in Sheffield, would say it could not happen to a nicer man.

Yet – and I am not trying to be funny – I feel sorry for him. I am not at all sure he deserves all this.

To start with, it is very doubtful whether the coalition’s withdrawal of Peter Mandelson’s £80m election bribe loan to Sheffield Forgemasters was unjustified when the press it was intended to finance would probably have been very profitable in a nuclear renaissance. It merely looks parsimonious against the level of support expected from us for Europe’s distressed nations and bankers’ bonuses.

I fully accept that it is always difficult precisely to identify personal and political advantage in claims of serving the national interest. But, in eventually taking the Lib Dems into coalition with the Conservatives, Clegg would have had to be very naïve indeed to believe he had landed in a bed of roses.

Just like the Tories, he was on to a hiding to nothing, given Labour’s toxic debt-laden legacy and a £150bn budget deficit. Yet he did his duty. And he has continued to do it with generally better grace than his unfortunate colleagues, Vince Cable and Chris Huhne, neither of whom knows the meaning of loyalty.

He can be legitimately criticised for (thank God) rushing a referendum on the Alternative Vote before the nation had any reason to feel grateful to him and his party for helping to return Britain to solvency.

But to batter him for reneging on his promise to kill university tuition fees is ridiculous, given Gordon Brown’s poisoned bequest. I say that as one who hates the whole idea of saddling youngsters with £30,000 or more of debt before they start work.

Clegg has to be judged – as does Cameron – by the detailed coalition agreement they published at the time of taking over responsibility for our governance.

I am no more convinced that the Liberal Democrats’ influence on the coalition has been entirely benign than I am that their current carping and promises of “muscular Liberalism”, whatever that may be, are helpful either to them or the coalition.

Nor, for that matter, do I believe the Tories have covered themselves in glory in their first 12 months back in government. But that is in the nature of coalitions. Nobody can be entirely satisfied. In peacetime coalition is known as making the best of a bad job – and in this case a very bad job indeed.

It is the joint responsibility of Cameron and Clegg to deliver this nation in a financially viable state in 2015.

Clegg would do well to remind his ragbag team that now electoral reform has gone down the drain their only hope for the future is to prove their worth in government.

Sooner or later Britain is going to demand clarity of purpose, competence and a certain honesty of its politicians. That is a chance for the Lib Dems to salvage something from their first experience of government in 80 years. Clegg seems to recognise this more than most. Leave the lad alone for a bit. Give him a chance.