Why is Nick Clegg so stroppy?

I've just listened to Nick Clegg's interview on the Today programme. I tried, honestly I did, to listen to what he was saying but I just couldn't get past his manner. Why is he so stroppy? It was a perfectly light canter around his own party's tax policies. There was nothing too heavy. No personal attack, no really tough questions. He sounds like he is going to walk out of the interview at any moment having thrown his glass of water over the presenter and upturning the table before kicking the door on his way out.

It's a fact of life that the Lib Dems have difficulty making themselves heard in the media. They generally gain support in a general election as they can demand more airtime. I wonder whether that will be the case next time with Nick Clegg as leader. His biography has echoes of David Cameron's but I can't imagine a wider gulf in personal style. Having said that, I'm not sure it is just style. It is temperament as well. It is type of temperament that led to him marching his MPs out of the Commons chamber when he couldn't get his way on the Lisbon Treaty.

I honestly think the Lib Dems have made a huge mistake in replacing Menzies Campbell with a completely unproven alternative. I don't know what the Lib Dems can now do but I really think Nick Clegg needs to look very closely at his way of communicating. Stroppy doesn't cut it in the modern media age.

Clegg riding the tax waltzer

Nick Clegg describes the tax regime under Labour as a 'tombola tax system.' Good line. But the tax system he proposes is akin to a waltzer tax system, just as you think it's spun one way, it spins back again. The whole thing ends up in a dizzying mess.

Let's leave aside his claim that some people on low incomes are paying 'effective' tax rates of 90% (did he mean 'marginal' rather than 'effective' by any chance? Are you telling me that someone on £10,000 pa could be taking home just £1,000 pa? Nonsense.) The mishmash of proposals will have all sorts of bewildering effects. Let's just take those on low incomes:

- Basic tax down to 16%. Good.
- Tax shifted to pollution (the poorer you are the higher proportion of your incomes in consumed by energy costs and the like). Bad.
- Reducing taxes further after tax avoidance clamp-down. Goodish. If tax avoidance was so easy to cease someone else would have done it by now so probably won't happen. Remember the non-doms saga?
- Scale back tax credits. Bad- Clegg is right that it would be simpler to take people out of tax altogether. Simpler but I'm afraid more costly and less targeted.
- Introduce a local income tax system. Good or bad. If you are single and working could be good depending on the rate. If you are a working couple would be bad. If you are on a fixed income, undeniably good.

So overall, if you are on a low income I think you would rightly be concerned about the overall Lib Dem tax package. The most amazing thing is that having castigated Gordon Brown for the complexity of the current tax system, it would be just as difficult if not more so to calculate whether you were better or worse off under the Lib Dem proposals.

The one thing that the Lib Dem tax waltzer isn't is simple. Dizzying, quite fun, politically opaque, yes but simple, no.

Top blogger in town

One of the pioneer US bloggers, Jerome Armstrong, has been in the UK. His website http://www.mydd.com is a must visit and must visit often. I recently mentioned Jerome in my review of 'The Argument.' It seems that the Lib Dems have been trying to get ahead of the game on the e-communication front. I worked on the 2001 new media campaign for Labour- a campaign that was later described as 'the first election in which the internet influenced electoral politics.' I don't actually agree with that (said by no less than Alastair Campbell.) But the next election could be.

(Shameless plug alert) In my book, Viral Politics, I discussed how the point wasn't the technology, it was more about understanding how people would communicate in a new media environment. Well, people like Jerome Armstrong are taking the theory and putting it into practice. Who will be the first to 'get it' in the UK context? No-one has yet...

Army Cadets

I was fascinated to see that the Tories are considering a proposal to introduce the army cadets into every secondary school as reported by the Evening Standard tonight. You can take the boy out of Eton, but you can't take Eton out of the boy.....

Now I don't know what others' experience was of the Combined Cadet Force (as it was called in my day) but I remember feeling faintly ridiculous marching around the school playground for no apparent reason. I went once. Then played football instead for the rest of the year. That's not quite true. I went one more time because we were going to get to fire a machine gun (c'mon- that IS fun) but ended up being thrown in a river. That was it- back to football and hiding from detention.

Anyway, good one Team Cameron. Can't wait to see the reaction if the idea goes any further. What else? Dunkings for failing exams? Bring back fagging? School song and recantation of the Latin motto every morning?

POST SCRIPT: Nick Clegg was atrocious on Newsnight tonight- stroppy, incoherent, flustered. I am told by people who have known him for years that he does have talent. Surely he could have picked a policy area where his party isn't so ridiculously divided and tactically perverse for the first public demonstration of his leadership abilities?

POST SCRIPT II: Arsenal were absolutely fantastic tonight. Hats off to them. Manchester United were mediocre and still don't look the part in Europe.

Nick Clegg's Lib Dems (errata)

I stated in a post yesterday that the Lib Dems are not potty.

I apologise unreservedly:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7265516.stm

Nick Clegg's Lib Dems

Leader of the Liberal Democrats is the hardest job in British politics. Chancellor of the Exchequer is pretty tough. Leader of the Opposition has its frustrations for sure. As Prime Minister you are doomed to a number of years of accelerated aging and personal abuse. At least with all these jobs, you have some control over your destiny. At least if you make mistakes they really matter.

As Leader of the Lib Dems if you make a mistake it's only your personal pride that takes the hit, a wider consequence is difficult to discern. The position does matter though. Should there be a hung parliament you become rather important. If opinion polls are whereabouts they are now at the time of the general election then Nick Clegg will come under a considerable amount of scrutiny. The question will be, do we want this lot holding the whip hand in the new Government? If the answer is 'no', public opinion could swing one way or the other but decisively away from the notion of a hung parliament much as happened in 1992.

To get your share of media space as Leader of the Lib Dems you need something different to say apart from 'we're not Labour or Tory', you need to be personally and politically effective, and you need to be running a party that does not want the introduction of insane policies- say, closing prisons and turning them in the warehouse network behind a state-run drugs supply operation manned by former inmates or some such. How is Nick Clegg doing?

Well, he's been rather ineffective so far. Today's call for a euro-referendum is typical of the worthy but slightly off target position that he's been taking. For a pro-european he's unnecessarily playing with fire. In Prime Minister's question time, his presence is weak and again he comes across as worthy but scatter-gun in his approach. In terms of the criteria outlined above, he has failed to craft a distinctive or substantive narrative, he has not displayed the personality or tactical political ability to command attention but his party is not potty, they are just rather ill-defined nowadays.

The real problem he has in his Treasury spokesperson, Vince Cable. Certainly on the personal/ political effectiveness measure, Cable is head and shoulders above his party's leader. When the Lib Dems ditched Menzies Campbell on outrageously ageist grounds for a party that purports to believe in equality, they allowed themselves to be seduced by some really woolly thinking about image and the modern media. Cable himself was seduced by this superficial analysis and failed to stand. Lib Dems failed to ask, who will make the best leader? Cable failed to assert, actually I would make the best leader.

So the party is in a bit of a pickle. There is something delightfully eccentric about Vince Cable though he is, it does need to be said, formidably bright and highly politically astute. Like that animated eccentric, Wallace, there is something endearingly heroic about him. That type of thing tends to attract attention.

Menzies Campbell's sartorial fogeyism might lead one to accuse him of wearing the wrong trousers. Nick Clegg might just be leader but at the wrong time. Without Vince Cable, it would seem that the Lib Dems might just have the wrong leader.