Nick Clegg: our part in his downfall

I first met Nick Clegg after I wrote a pamphlet for Liberator in 2000 about how we might re-imagine a political party which could, once again, have a mass membership.  He was interested in ideas.  I liked him enormously.

I have only spoken to him twice since he became deputy prime minister.  You can't really be friends with senior politicians.  You have to devote yourself completely to their cause and be useful to them.  I don't blame him for this: it's the nature of the job and, also, I did rather let him down a couple of times.

But I have a memory before that of how he thought.  Wrestling with new ways forward.  Sceptical in a positive way that is actually very unusual for working politicians. He was a gut Liberal and I'm sure he still is.

I believed at the time, and still believe, that he was the right choice as leader. We needed a thinker, which is what I wrote during his leadership campaign in my first ever blog post here in 2007.

We still do need a thinker (which is why I will be supporting Norman Lamb).  It wasn't that Clegg failed to fulfil this role.  It was, as DPM, that he was locked in a Whitehall office with an agenda that required a minute by minute response.  It wasn't exactly conducive to thinking, so the thinking still urgently needs doing - and at least as much as the campaigning.

The trouble with departing swiftly after a major setback is that you tend to get the blame for it, and we have already seen those - from David Steel downwards - who have seen this as the moment to blame Clegg.

Not only do I think that is wrong, it is also rather shortsighted.  Because I believe, in his political skill, his eloquence, his humour and his unique ability to sound human, Nick Clegg was the most effective leader the Liberal force has had in this country since the Second World War.  I don't want to lose those elements of the party's personality that he pioneered.

I have seen tributes to his integrity, and they are absolutely correct - who else would have taken care to choose his words so carefully that he did not betray a confidence from a political opponent on the Today programme, when the temptation to do so must have been overwhelming?

But if we think back over the TV debates, his performance in 2015 was extraordinary - passionate, articulate but also human.  That is such a difficult trick to pull off for a politician, and it is cruel and unjust that he did not reap the benefit of it.

His great skill has been to see how policy objectives might be achieved, despite the mess of the government system, and despite the opposition from his coalition partners.  The idea of localism by individual City Deals, which he masterminded, has made a huge difference.

I'm not, of course, endorsing every campaign decision in 2015, or every decision the coalition made.  It is so easy in hindsight to say what should have happened.

Of course the tuition fees business, which has ended up giving us a more successful and fairer policy, could have been managed better - and perhaps would have been after a few more months experience.  But before history hangs that like an albatross around Nick Clegg's neck, let's just remember that he warned the party not to adopt the abolition position.

They took no notice.  And here I had a personal part to play as a member of the Lib Dems' federal policy committee, and I should confess it.  Along with a majority of other members of the committee, I voted to carry on the policy to abolish tuition fees - even though the leader had warned us of the consequences.

The consequences happened.

Actually, it is worse than that. When it came to the moment, before the 2010 election, I couldn’t decide how I ought to vote on tuition fees, and I’m not absolutely sure I did vote to maintain our policy against tuition fees or not. Such an important decision, as it turned out, and I can’t remember what I did.

There we are.  That's my confession.  The truth is that the defeat the party just suffered was a defeat for the party as a whole, not just for the leader or the strategy.

It was also the culmination of an intellectual and electoral decline which had been going on for a decade. Clegg took the party, turbo-charged it suddenly, took a place in government for the first time since 1916, managed it magnificently.  But the basic trends have been downwards since the turn of the century.
But why are the critics shortsighted?  Well, here's my prediction, and it is inspired by the latest blog on the New Statesman's website.  The period when Clegg was deputy prime minister will soon be regarded as a brief shining moment of civilisation, successfully steering the economy to some kind of security, and pioneering major economic and educational shifts that will stay with us.

That understanding will happen much sooner than most of us expect.
It isn't a proper reward for the former party leader, but it is at least fully deserved.  I feel very proud to have been a member of the party when he led it.
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