At a time when the country needs them, the party seems intent on self-destruction
Anyone thinking of buying the current leftwing line that the Liberal Democrats are a party of the right should have been at their conference. Concern for the poor and greenery dominated the fringe. The activists were typical Observer readers: kind and thoughtful people. Ministers made sarcastic asides about the Conservatives to cheer up the base and pretended, without conviction, that they were "plebs" fighting the Tory toffs in the corridors of Whitehall. "I float between Labour and Lib Dem," Steve Coogan told the delegates. "But never the Tories. I'd rather pull my own eyes out than vote Tory."
So would most of the Brighton crowd. But there they were in a coalition with Conservatives they despised, scorned by former friends and missing several million voters, who now regret ever listening to them.
Socrates said that living with the male libido was like being chained to a madman. The Liberals feel much the same about living with the Tories. How can it be that people who went into politics to help the unfortunate and the unrepresented have ended up supporting an austerity programme that is grinding down the disadvantaged without bringing the promised recovery? Their big reason for joining the coalition – their grand justification for the alliance with conservatism – was to enact constitutional reform. In this, they have failed utterly. They blew their chance to change the voting system and lost their fight to democratise the House of Lords. Satirists should relish their position. After decades of pounding the pavements, the Liberals are in power for the first time since 1945. Yet there will be less constitutional reform in the 2010 parliament than in any parliament in living memory. They haven't even removed hereditary peers from Westminster.
You can hear their disorientation in Nick Clegg's language. It has degenerated into a cliche-infested jibber-jabber in which words no longer connect to cogent thoughts. Just before the 2010 general election, he told the Observer that Britain would be hit by waves of "Greek-style unrest" if the new government tried to push through draconian spending cuts. Now he warns that Britain would share the fate of Greece if it did not accept austerity. As the conference began, Clegg said of his attempt to persuade parents to give money from their pension pots to their children: "This is part and parcel of something which I think most people agree with, which is that as we fill in the black hole in the public finances we have also got to make sure that we do not put Humpty Dumpty back together again and make the same mistakes, that we rewire the British economy and make it fairer and give people more opportunities."
Only men who no longer think before they speak refuse to acknowledge contradictions or mix four metaphors into one sentence. Clegg does not talk to make an argument but to pass the time and fill the silence. His speeches are like an overcooked stew, whose ingredients have boiled down to mush. You swallow them without tasting them.
There are two ways of looking at the collapse of British liberalism Clegg is presiding over. The political journalist tries to predict the Liberal Democrats' performance at the next election. The rest of us wonder if anyone will mourn the party's passing.
The scale of its collapse seems vast at present. Peter Kellner of YouGov says that on current polls the parliamentary party will be reduced from 57 seats to 10. Of the 1.6 million Labour-leaning or otherwise leftish voters who supported the Lib Dems in 2010, 1.4 million have abandoned the party. Of the 1.8 million Lib Dem voters with no fixed allegiance, 1.5 million have gone. Kellner acknowledges that you cannot be certain that leftwing voters in marginal seats won't support the Lib Dems again if it is the only means of stopping the Tory candidate at the next election.
I cannot see the future but wonder if the old appeals for tactical voting will wash. The left can hate as viciously as the right. The left can indeed hate along with the right. As with Tony Blair before them, Liberal Democrats in general and Nick Clegg in particular are on the receiving end of abuse from both sides. I cannot see leftwing voters supporting them to stop the Tories again, when to their minds the Lib Dems are as bad as the Tories. More importantly, Liberal Democrat politicians share the same doubts.
Until I went to the Brighton conference, I thought the answer to the party's problem was simple: make Vince Cable leader, win back leftish supporters and save a few seats. But when you speak to the party's leading figures in private, you learn that they will do anything to stop Cable. He is vain, they say, so egotistical and ambitious that he cannot work with his colleagues. Whether their allegations are true does not matter. Because they are believed, Cable will be fought and, if his enemies have their way, defeated.
Even though I did not vote for them, I accept that the implosion of the Liberal Democrats will damage the causes of civil liberties and accountable government. Even though I think the euro is a machine that destroys democracies and livelihoods, I accept that Britain needs one mainstream party that makes the case for the European Union. I'll miss the Liberal Democrats if they slink off into obscurity, in other words, and so may you.
Perhaps they will have the chance to redeem themselves. If the Liberals' big reason for entering coalition was constitutional reform, the Conservatives went into government to impose an austerity programme they believed would restore the public finances and allow growth to resume. To date, the Conservatives' failure has been as great as the Liberal Democrats' failure. The 2010 coalition may be remembered as a bad marriage in which neither party got what it wanted. If stagnation continues into 2013, if – even of its own terms – austerity proves to be self-defeating and continues to deplete the tax base the Treasury needs to reduce the deficit, then the Liberals would have an excuse to cut their chains and seek to force a general election. They would be acting in the national interest. They would be giving the voters a chance to speak their minds. They may even save themselves a few seats.
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