What if the Lib Dems have really had it?

Nick Clegg is probably looking forward to the TV election debates with almost as little enthusiasm as David Cameron is. The contrast between the Cleggmania of 2010 and the near contempt of many voters today will be hard for him to take – or would be hard to take if the debates actually go ahead. Luckily for Clegg, I think Cameron will try to make sure they don’t.

The LibDem leader will be relieved. For one thing, his most recent outing in a similar format with Nigel Farage was hardly a success . For another, he was bound to have his March 2011 remarks quoted back at him – his suggestion that he and Cameron“won’t find anything to bloody disagree on in the bloody TV debates!” The spirit of the ill-advised Downing Street press conference which launched the coalition has vanished. But the glib soundbites are still very much on the record.

The sad truth for Clegg is that he is, for the time being, finished as a salesman for LibDem politics. It is not just about the U turn on tuition fees. With less than a week to go to the election in 2010 Clegg told Reuters that the Conservatives’ position on cutting the deficit was too extreme . His view, he said, was “common sense”: “My eight-year-old (son) ought to be able to work this out – you shouldn’t start slamming on the brakes when the economy is barely growing.”

A few days later, following what he described as a troubling phone call from Sir Mervyn King at the Bank of England, Clegg had become a convert to austerity. Sir Mervyn, for his part, said he had offered no new information in his chat with the deputy prime minister-to-be. The speed and violence of his change of heart undermined Clegg’s credibility from the outset. The public have sensed this all along: he was just too keen and too self-satisfied with the thought of becoming deputy prime minister. The “sorry” video met with the response it deserved  .

The LibDems have suffered the common fate of smaller parties in coalition governments: to get much of the blame for problems and little of the praise for successes. To have refused to go into coalition in 2010 might have looked like cowardice, a failure to grab the first decent chance in two generations to exercise power. And yet wouldn’t a more modest position of “confidence and supply” have left the party in a better position today? There need have been no volte face on tuition fees, and far more grudging support for cuts. The attempted decoupling which is currently going on would have been much more convincing if the original coupling had not been so enthusiastic and whole-hearted. Yes, there would have been no ministerial positions, or cars, or salaries. But the LibDems might have remained a natural repository of protest votes, thus stifling Ukip and preserving a better mood for the European debate the party is supposed to care so much about. The poll ratings for these two parties would now quite possibly look very different. The LibDems would be in much less trouble.

Britain’s sub-optimal voting system forces the LibDems to be slippery – to say one thing when competing against Conservatives and another when fighting Labour. And, ever pragmatic, the party is supposedly taking a very realistic view of its chances in May next year. The Conservatives are in second place in 39 out of the party’s 57 seats, and thus remain their most serious opponent. Several LibDem-held seats where Labour are second look likely to move back into the red column.

The paradox for Labour, clearly, is that a complete LibDem meltdown would be bad news if it produced loads of new Tory MPs. Labour will hope that incumbency and hard work will save LibDems in most of those 39 Tory targeted seats, while trusting it will prove ineffectual in the seats Labour are targeting. Hope springs eternal. This is all part of the confusing mix of pre-election unknowns that will make the next few months so intriguing and hard to predict.

One forecast is perhaps a little easier to make: that Labour will be unlikely to form a coalition with a LibDem party still being led by Nick Clegg. Indeed, coalition does not look like the preferred option at all if Labour is comfortably the largest party. The past four and half years have seen to that.

For Clegg personally, the prospects are every bit as grim as those for his party, if the recent Ashcroft polling in his constituency can be believed . The final irony for him and his party will be if, 18 years on from May 1997, May 2015 produces a “Were you up for Clegg?” moment. It could happen.