Lying Everywhere But Down

While a certain desperation to be populist is understandable in the present climate, the ex-Deputy Conservatives may have pushed the bounds of good taste a little by staging yet another tired zombie comedy and allowing the sad remains of Nick Clegg to reek and gargle their way through the old, worn-out lines. Such has been the moral effect of fagging for the Bullingdons that the remains of Nick Clegg are now using the Conservatives' language of historical rah-rah to excuse his party's record in office. Like the Somme, the Bengal famine, the South African concentration camps and the slave trade, the coalition was all a very long time ago. Furthermore, the ex-Deputy Conservatives ought to be jolly proud of themselves, mostly on the pragmatic grounds that mea culpas don't win elections but also because the narrative that they "merrily went along with a savage, ideological approach to austerity which deliberately penalised the poor" is simply not true. Presumably the remains of Nick Clegg possess video evidence that the Deputy Conservative MPs whose seats he so proudly sacrificed did not always toddle through the lobbies with merry smiles on their faces; otherwise, much to our regret, we would be forced to suspect that truth and the remains of Nick Clegg have still not quite managed to get into the same rose garden.