Oh the shame...

I can picture him now hiding under the duvet blubbing and dreading going into work tomorrow. Poor Nick Clegg has been humiliated by the nasty nasty Prime Minister and is probably right now trying to get his wife to ring in sick for him.

What I hear you ask is the cause of this gross humiliation? Has Dave found a baby photo of nick without his nappy or is it more likely him and George Osbourne persuaded Nick to play one of their old Eton dorm games and is now threatening to put the video on Youtube and tell his wife it was her shoes they used.

A game that got out
of hand

Nope it's neither of these.

How's he going to show his face in public now that Ken Clarke's idea to save money is not going ahead? As far as I can make out it doesn't seem like Nick gives a scabby rats ass whether it's this policy or another that saves the £100m the Justice ministry's got to dig out. Far from humiliated I'd imagine he'd feels a little more perplexed at this story; well the headline anyway, the story offers only this flimsy evidence of his shame.

What the journalist James Chapman's done is mistake the word Liberal meaning "favourable to progress or reform, as in political or religious affairs." with the Liberal Democrats, meaning "favourable to sandals and eating tofu in Cornwall"  It's an easy mistake for anyone to make, words can be very confusing. Deaf & Death sound very similar but mean very different things, I remember having that circled in red in a story I wrote in junior school.


So in James' Cinzano addled mind this confusing word mingled with Cameron telling radio 2 he'd be a right hard bastard if it wasn't for Nick holding him back telling him it's not worth and added up to a humiliating day for the Lib Dems.


What Mr Chapman actually missed was the humiliation of a government announcing another shiny policy to the world only for it to be ripped to pieces by people asking a few rudimentary questions. The Prime Minister insists that ""The tough, strong thing to do is to say, 'Yes, we can make these plans better,'" when your daft ideas are held up to scrutiny. That may be the strong thing to do, but surely the clever thing to do would be keep your schemes to yourself till you've thought them through. So when you think flogging off the forests or the NHS, or taking free milk from kids or housing benefit from long term unemployed or letting rapists halve the time they spend in prison why not talk them through with a grown up before announcing them to the public?


Thatcher famously told a Conservative conference that "This Lady's not for turning" whereas Dave seems to prefer a page out of Ann Widdecomb's Viennese waltz text book of twirls.

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