There's a Difference Between Sameness and Surrender

Daveybloke's orange muffler, whose word is his bond, has been given permission to assert that he is still the leader of a separate party to Daveybloke, actually. Both Daveybloke and his orange muffler are acutely aware of this fact, which is one more advantage they both have over the rest of us. It would, of course, be uncharitable in the last degree to suggest that Clegg's lurch into pseudo-autonomy is merely a public-relations exercise for the benefit of voters in tomorrow's by-election. Clegg regards the punishment of the poorest and most vulnerable for the derelictions of Daveybloke's chums in the City, and the Liberal Democrat policy of pledging to oppose something and then voting in favour of it, as sacrifices made by the Liberal Democrats, actually: "We are doing a lot of heavy lifting", he said. But that doesn't mean that people shouldn't be reminded now and then that the Liberal Democrats are conniving at the attacks on the poor and vulnerable, and breaking their own election pledges, purely as a matter of expediency, because the Liberal Democrats are, after all, and "will be and always will be", a separate independent party with a separate identity, led by a completely different bland mid-forties privately-schooled white male millionaire, actually.