Another Liberal leader, another leadership crisis. Neither alcohol nor age this time, just bad judgement. If you missed the story, Nick Clegg and an aide were on a domestic flight, discussing their team, and they were overheard. It's like the famous Fougasse (left), except the order of seating was reversed, the German officers were actually just one Mirror journalist, the gossipers were both male, and it wasn't on a bus. Oh, and it won't cost any lives. Other than that, a perfect match.
Here's Clegg on Steve Webb, their climate change spokesman: "We need someone with good ideas. At the moment, they just don't add up." I think Webb's only promoting party policy, but that doesn't make it any less true. They'd move him to Foreign Affairs, except "he'd be useless". And thus fit in with the rest of the team, surely?
In one breath he went on to complain that Julia Goldsworthy gets patronised, and in the next explained she couldn't move to Foreign Affairs because she's "just not equipped to do it". Which is it, Nick?
Chris Huhne, who would have made a slightly more formidable leader for them, is up for demotion too for insufficient "emotional intelligence". Hasn't Clegg heard of keeping your enemies closer? Apparently Huhne was going to be told they needed their big hitters before an election, not him, and this would somehow cushion the blow. Makes sense to me. Good politics.
What the articles don't say is what's happening to Ed Davey, who currently holds the apparently toxic and impossible international brief for them. Is he about to get thrown out of the helicopter? Or if he's simply moving, who else is getting the chop?
The Yorksher Gob, herself a Liberal, has given him both barrels and then whacked him with the handle as well. Apologies for quoting at such length, but it's irresistable.
"He hasn't established himself as a credible force in politics, and no amount of slagging other people off is going to disguise that."
"I think he fully deserves the Cameron-lite label he hates - not because of his politics, which I mostly share, but because of the off-handed and arrogant way he behaves towards people he perceives as less important than him, which I have witnessed first hand. Let me make clear that he is the ONLY example of such behaviour towards the "lower orders" that I have seen at any level of the party. EVERYBODY else seems capable of treating people from the hotel cleaner to the Queen as equally human, but Our Glorious Leader is just Too Important to acknowledge some people, and that just sticks in my craw."
"Fail, Glorious Leader. Epic fail."
This is what happens when you treat leadership like facial hair and change it on a whim. Pay the price. Other Liberals are upset. Even dead ones.
Jim Jay believes it's instant karma for that internal flight.
Pure bad luck that even a political journalist recognised him, I say.
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