Crooked Lines

Daveybloke's flexible fag, the faithful little chap who signed up to the Osborne economic miracle, who drove a coach and horses through the coalition agreement in order to privatise the NHS, and who once promised the greatest programme of parliamentary reform since 1832, has been lecturing the remains of his party on realism. Wee Nicky wants the fragments to become a "fully-fledged party of government"; in Standard English, he wants them to stop being Deputy Conservatives and become real ones, like New Labour. Wee Nicky "acknowledged the Lib Dems had taken a hit following the decision to enter coalition with the Conservatives in 2010". Most of us were under the impression that the Lib Dems took their various hits following their various decisions not to compromise with the Real Conservatives but to adopt wholesale the Real Conservatives' swivel-eyed programme of pilferings and persecutions after barely token resistance; so it is jolly nice of Wee Nicky to set the record straight. Wee Nicky warned that irrelevance, impotence and slow decline holding the comfort blanket of opposition would be a good deal worse than irrelevance, impotence and rapid annihilation cuddling the red box of ministerial office. Accordingly, Wee Nicky has commissioned his chum David Laws to draw up a severely pragmatic new manifesto, "a to-do list, not a flight of fancy", spelling out the party's red lines for any coalition negotiations, whether with the Real Conservatives, Labour or UKIP. True, there is some time to go before the election; but it is no doubt just as well to get the sour laughter out of the way before starting the inevitable process of turning the red lines orange and then painting them out altogether.