Rod Liddle

So, three weeks in and Vince Cable has resigned his position of deputy leader of the Liberal Democrats – ostensibly because he will be “too busy” to undertake the non-duties demanded by the post. Do you swallow that? I’m not sure that I do. Meanwhile, David Davis has emerged with guns blazing over the proposed hike in capital gains tax, with a clever statement which roots his objections in traditional Tory terms; don’t punish hard-working middle class people in order to make things easier for the feckless, overweight, shell-suited, Big Mac munching skag addled untermensch (or words to that effect).

Fixed term election? Five years? Can anyone, aside from Clegg, see this arrangement lasting longer than, say, next Friday afternoon at about four o clock? Can you really imagine inner city Lib Dem MPs, and those in the former north west cotton belt, supporting the sorts of cuts we will see in the emergency budget? And if they do support those cuts, they’ll be out of a job very soon indeed. The usually dependable Daniel Finkelstein has heralded all this as a brilliant re-alignment of British politics; but it may finish off the Lib Dems. And all for an honorific title – Deputy Prime Minister (the post used to keep Prescott and Heseltine quiet) and the promise of a referendum on AV, which they will surely lose.

So much epic bilge has been talked in these last four weeks that it will take me a long time to sort through the posts to find the most spastically stupid contribution. But expect a decision by nine o clock Friday morning. Obviously there have been some important entries since my last post on the subject: “What stupid bitch thought it would be a good idea to let me meet that bigoted racist old cow”, or words to that effect, from the Prime Minister, for example. But Cameron insisting that I must choose “hope - not fear” runs it pretty close. Please append your suggestions below. Meanwhile, I think my prediction a couple of weeks ago – which was, if I remember, something like 36 Con 28 Lab 24 Lib Dem – is holding up pretty well.

One small piece of cheer for Gordon Brown as he heads towards annihilation is that he no longer has the support of The Guardian. That leaves it slightly easier for others of us to vote Labour. The Guardian has never been a party of the left, but instead one of the metro liberal faux left. It was, for a while, utterly besotted with the SDP – possibly the most high-born party to have contested an election in Britain since the Marquess of Rockingham in 1782. In a sense, Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger is being wholly consistent, in supporting whichever public schoolboy standing for PM has the cutest smile. Otherwise, if you are a Labour supporter, this has been a singularly depressing week or so.

What question should I ask David Miliband on tomorrow’s (Friday) edition of the Campaign Show on BBC News? All contributions gratefully received, even those which are not obscene or make references to the Liebore Party, etc etc. There may be another politician on the show who will keep you amused for a while. In the meantime, hell, come on, spare me the research; what do you want to know from the Banana Kid?

I suppose it is the perfect expression of how and why the Labour Party has lost the white working class vote in the last fifteen years; it has only contempt for them. Opposition to immigration - as we know from Neathergate, well before Bigotgate – is seen by Labour has being rooted in a stupid xenophobia; no matter how mildly expressed, anyone who fears we may have let a few too many people into the country is at heart a racist, a bigot. This cat has been out of the bag for a while now, but it is still something the party denies in public. This is why Lord Mandelson was so swift and insistent that Brown had not MEANT that Gillian Duffy was a bigot, he did not really think that at all. But he does think that. They all do.

I find the way the Prime Ministerial debates have been spun by the media and commentators more interesting than the debates themselves. It seemed clear to me that Gordon Brown was the real loser of the first debate, as all the post-event polls suggested, and yet the media – even the Tory papers – stuck the boot into David Cameron. In the last debate I thought Brown substantially improved and most of the post-event polls showed little distance between him and Cameron – and yet this time, Brown has been spun as the loser. I ought to add, I am not commenting upon their actual performances during the debates – all three, on both occasions, behaved like meerkats on acid – just the polls and the way the press reported the story.

Terrific stuff from Nick Clegg, reported in the Daily Mail here. Nick suggests Britain has a misplaced sense of superiority as a consequence of winning the second world war, should recognize that Germany has become a “vastly” more prosperous country and that we have a “greater cross to bear” than the Germans for the events of 1939-45. This is interesting because it is precisely the views of almost all foreigners, except for maybe the Norwegians. Nick seemed to have formed these notions while serving as an MEP, open to the influence of those Europeans around him and to whom he was inclined to suck up, and maybe also the input from his Spanish missus (they really hate us) and his own Dutch ancestry.