A Referendum on Nick Clegg

Regardless of how you feel about AV, the process of debating voting reform in this country will have one beneficial effect. Nick Clegg - a man who has lied to himself about what the electorate wants, what the country needs and his own necessity – will finally come to understand what a dreadful series of mistakes he has made. The AV referendum shouldn’t be about Clegg, but it inevitably will be. Voters will associate Clegg with the ‘Yes’ vote. They know it is something he desperately wants, that his party will definitely need in the next election and that success for the ‘No’ vote will ultimately humiliate him. It is the electorate’s first opportunity to punish Nick Clegg for his broken promises, his misguided leadership and joining an ideologically opposed party in a coalition. They will find it very hard to resist that temptation. He is already absent from the public side of the AV debate – his image has been removed from campaign leaflets and he has failed to attend key ‘Yes’ vote functions and launches. Given that Clegg must have been involved in such strategies, surely he must now be beginning to question his previous decisions. There is a sick irony to Clegg’s justification for coalition government. One of the clear concessions he received for backing so many Tory policies to the hilt has been this referendum. It seems now that this very act is one of the biggest deciding factors in voters not backing his flagship proposal. Perhaps even Nick Clegg - deep down in some primitive part of his brain, the part dealing with survival instinct – might start to question the worth of his Faustian pact. It won’t be David Cameron coming for the Deputy Prime Minister’s political soul, however: it will be his betrayed voters.