Nick Cohen

Whoever first came up with the saying, “the left won the culture war, the right won the economic war and the centre won the political war,” deserves some kind of prize for encapsulating the politics of the late 20th century. It is a sign of the extent of the shock the current crisis has brought that none of this trio of truisms now holds true. The left won the culture war? So it once appeared. But look at the boomerang that has whirled back through the air and smacked the children of the 1960s in the face. As liberal-leftists they knew that racists, homophobes and misogynists were bad people with terrible ideas and so they built a cultural order that accepted excessive restrictions on free speech to protect marginalised groups.

The American journalist Michael Weiss wrote recently, “Tony Blair can’t be a war criminal. If he were, George Galloway would support him.”  The joke works on the assumption that the backers of despots in the West are always from the Dostoevskian dregs of extremist politics: wild and frothing men, far from the polite and sensible mainstream in which the British establishment resides. With Bashar al-Assad committing war crimes against his own people, ask yourself what kind of man wrote this article in that eminently respectable journal of international affairs, Foreign Policy.

Liberal Democrat fury at the behaviour of the prime minister is all over this morning’s papers. They are not just blustering because they lost the referendum – although, obviously, there is an element of that. They are also genuinely outraged that Cameron used the fact that Clegg compromised to form the coalition that put Cameron in Downing Street as a weapon against Clegg personally and the likelihood of more coalitions if the alternative vote won. One anonymous Lib Dem puts it like this to my colleague Andrew Rawnsley: "For the Conservatives, having asked us to make these compromises, then to attack us for making compromises, is breathtakingly hypocritical. There's bound to be payback. Some of it in unpredictable ways.

One should never be too prissy about political campaigns. But even when the usual excuses about the “rough and tumble of politics” have been trotted out, the argument about AV has been so dire it would have embarrassed an unusually truculent toddler. David Cameron elevated Sayeeda Warsi to the peerage and gave her in a seat in Cabinet even though she could not win a free election in Dewsbury on her own. This representative of unelected and unaccountable power always seemed an unlikely figure to lecture the public on democratic virtue, and so it has proved. Her claim that AV would help the BNP and other extremist parties has been the stupidest of the campaign to date.

Being the second in an occasional series. Part one is available here. Let me see if I can get this straight. The British Conservative Party has not won a general election since 1992, in part because the voters did not trust it to run the NHS. Ever since David Cameron became leader, the Tories have made a mighty effort to stop health destroying their electoral hopes. Through no fault of his own, David Cameron could not rebut the suspicion that toffs with private insurance would leave the common man and woman to suffer and die in under-funded NHS wards, by pointing to his family’s unhappy history. Because of the sickness of his son, he was able to say that he had seen the NHS up close, and came to admire its staff and its principles.

I worry that Coffee House sometimes fails to enrage readers sufficiently, so let me run a scenario past you, suggested to me by Rafael Behr, the Observer’s brilliant leader writer. The AV referendum is going to be the oddest vote. Turnout will be low, but how low will depend on where you live. Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales are having elections for their devolved assemblies. One would expect turnout to be reasonably high in all three countries, and the voters to state their preference in the AV referendum while they at the polling stations.

For as long as I can remember Billy Bragg has been arguing for tactical voting. He lives in some splendour in Dorset, and wants to drive the Tories out of the county by any means necessary. In 2005, although he was a Labour supporter, and on many issues was well to Left of Labour, he urged his comrades in West Dorset to back the only party with a chance of beating Oliver Letwin by voting Lib Dem. By the time of the 2010 election, the tactical vote had become ideological. Bragg declared that he was now committed to Clegg. The Lib Dems had “the best manifesto” and he would be voting for them with relish. Bragg’s love affair has not lasted.

Writing in today’s Guardian about the weekend protests, my colleague Jackie Ashley makes a half-true argument. ‘Miliband [cannot] be blamed for the embarrassing juxtaposition of his words at the Hyde Park rally and the actions of a group of anarchists in Oxford Street as they attacked the police. The Labour leader is no more responsible for the "black bloc" than David Cameron is for the BNP. It is absurd to argue that the democratically elected leader of the main opposition party should shy away from a huge public event because a few violent troublemakers might turn up on the fringes of it.’ And of course she is right to draw a distinction between the hundreds of thousands of decent marchers and the small mob of thugs and nutjobs.

Writing yesterday my esteemed colleague James Forsyth said that for want of a better alternative Jeremy Hunt was the Tory Party's coming man. I hate disagree with James, but I would put more money on Colonel Gaddafi making it through the next 12 months than the Conservatives' “rising star”. Every newspaper group with the exception of News International, along with the BBC, formally opposed Rupert Murdoch's takeover of Sky. The editors of every newspaper, television channel and radio station, with the exception of editors at News International, will be telling their hacks to go for Hunt.

Peter Mandelson’s publishers have sent me extracts from the updated  paperback edition of his memoirs, The Third Man,  which is out on 3 March. Here are his thoughts on Ed Miliband’s victory over David. 'It was a photo finish [and] I felt terrible for David. I felt even more worried for the party. This was not because I doubted Ed’s ability to become a strong or effective leader: he is a highly intelligent and thoughtful individual. It was because of the campaign message on which he had built his victory. It was left to Neil Kinnock, who had always found it hard to celebrate New Labour’s successes, to drive home this message. With their new leader’s triumph, he crowed, Labour’s old faithful had finally ‘got their party back’.