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How Clegg held Britain to ransom: Nick Clegg's cynical double-dealing and why he is stabbing his Coalition colleagues in the back, again! By QUENTIN LETTS

A new book by former Labour minister Lord Adonis described crafty negotiations in May 2010 when, we learned, a shifty Mr Clegg tried desperately to keep Gordon Brown in office for as long as possible

Another successful week for Nick Clegg. His party is down to single figures in opinion polls. The Queen’s Speech on Wednesday showed that his input to new Government policy is minimal. On Thursday, he tried to torpedo his own Government’s sensible childcare proposals. 

And a new book by former Labour minister Lord Adonis described crafty negotiations in May 2010 when, we learned, a shifty Mr Clegg tried desperately to keep Gordon Brown in office for as long as possible.

So how can this chaotic few days have been ‘a splendid week’? Well, because the Deputy Prime Minister has a new office — not a bad bivouac at that. In fact, some people call the 18th-century Dover House the loveliest perch in all of Whitehall. And, for the moment, it is Chateau Clegg. 

As Pa Larkin of TV’s The Darling Buds Of May used to say: ‘Perfick.’ 

Mr Clegg’s normal accommodation in the Cabinet Office has been sealed off while workmen remove asbestos, so the ‘DPM’ has pulled rank on Michael Moore, the low-profile Scottish Secretary who normally occupies Dover House. 

Cuckoo Clegg has requisitioned the Grade I listed building’s magnificent first-floor apartments, noted for their Ionic columns, acanthus leaf panelling and a Siena marble mantelpiece decorated with Androcles and the Lion. Poor Moore has been banished to the ground floor.

Mr Clegg’s party may be in dire trouble, but with weekend use of 3,500-acre, grace-and-favour Chevening in Kent, frequent trips abroad, ever larger retinue of state-paid aides and now his very own central London stately home, he is leading the life of an opulent aristocrat.

He has the full pomp and appurtenances of high office with the chauffeured limos, bodyguards, frequent meetings with the Queen and foreign leaders and front-row seats for himself and castanet-clacker Miriam, his Spanish wife, at the great social and state occasions. How very, very satisfying, at least for him. For people who must work with him in Government and in his party, things are markedly less sweet.

  More... QUENTIN LETTS: If there's one child who needs one-to-one nannying, it's Clegg Clegg's 'treacherous' U-turn on childcare condemned by MPs: Deputy PM publicly attacks plans to help cut costs for working families Leaving the EU would not be 'cataclysmic' for Britain, Boris Johnson insists as Tories increase pressure on Cameron

Conservatives and Lib Dems have been frustrated by his behaviour in recent days.‘It would be too strong to say he has flipped, but he is certainly behaving in an erratic way,’ says one MP. 

‘We think he may be starting to extract himself from the Coalition marriage. But he may just be weaving all over the motorway like a tired driver because he is knackered and confused.’ 

After last week’s council ballots and the South Shields by-election, the Cleggites insisted they had done reasonably well. Bunkum! 

Party president Tim Farron cut away from this lie and admitted they had been ‘obliterated’ in the by-election. (The Lib Dem candidate came a humiliating seventh just ahead of the Monster Raving Loony Party and he lost his deposit.)

Party president Tim Farron admitted the Lib Dems had been 'obliterated' in the South Shields by-election. (The Lib Dem candidate came seventh, just ahead of the Monster Raving Loony Party and he lost his deposit)

Senior backbench MP Simon Hughes talked of ‘patchy results’.

Messrs Farron and Hughes have little time for Nick Clegg. Mr Farron also struck a distinctly different note from his leader during the recent sex-pest allegations about party bigwig Lord Rennard. Mr Clegg’s reluctance to act more swiftly on claims by alleged female victims of Lord Rennard was a transformative moment for some Lib Dems. 

They had thought of Mr Clegg as a new man, an ‘enlightened progressive’. Yet his equivocation over Rennard smacked of old-style chauvinism. With Vince Cable having turned 70 on Thursday, Mr Farron must be prime candidate to oust Mr Clegg as Lib Dem leader.

The hand on the party tiller is increasingly shaky.

In Whitehall this week, as the Queen’s Speech was finally heard after weeks of Coalition wrangling, there were tales of Lib Dem ministers ‘not being able to deliver Clegg’. 

These senior Lib Dems are no longer able to speak confidently on their leader’s behalf and promise that he would continue to support agreed details of Government policy.

In Whitehall this week, as the Queen's Speech was finally heard after weeks of Coalition wrangling, there were tales of Lib Dem ministers 'not being able to deliver Clegg'

This is no way to run a government. Cue uncertainty, delay, acrimony, civil service hand-rubbing and plain embarrassment, with senior Lib Dems having to confess ‘I don’t know’ when asked in meetings if their unpredictable leader still supports long-agreed policies.

This is what seems to have happened with the childcare policy — an area of intense interest to parents and one which Lib Dems once regarded very much as home territory for their party. 

The Coalition had agreed a slight loosening of bureaucratic restrictions on the number of children who can be looked after by childminders. 

The measure, which could reduce childcare costs, was included in the Queen’s Speech. Lib Dem spin doctors patrolled Westminster’s press corridors on Wednesday enthusing about the policy.Then, overnight, came word that Mr Clegg had his doubts.

Education Minister Liz Truss, who is just the sort of Tory moderniser Mr Clegg should be comfortable with, was hauled to the Commons Despatch Box to explain matters, and had to use all her skill to see off a career-threatening rumpus. 

Downing Street was bemused. Mr Clegg’s own backbenchers showed almost zero support for him.

So what is going on? Is Mr Clegg undergoing some sort of minor crisis? Or is he simply acting in character — a character which, as Andrew Adonis’s book suggests, may be as slippery as an avocado stone? 

When the last General Election produced a hung parliament, Lord Adonis (one of the most trusted people at Westminster) was in Gordon Brown’s inner circle. 

He kept detailed notes of the negotiations to try to form a Lib-Lab Government. Repeatedly in the Adonis account, Mr Clegg emerges as unreliable, shifty, insubstantial, weaselly. He lacked the moral fibre to tell Mr Brown to his face that his personal continuance as PM was the block to a deal. 

There was also an underhand leaking operation to the Press being conducted by Mr Clegg’s Left-wing ally and patron Lord (Paddy) Ashdown. Mr Brown and Mr Clegg had confidential meetings which — as far as Lord Adonis could tell — had gone well.

Repeatedly in the Adonis account, Mr Clegg emerges as unreliable, shifty, insubstantial, weaselly. He lacked the moral fibre to tell Mr Brown to his face that his personal continuance as PM was the block to a deal

But then non-attender Ashdown spread false rumours that they had been a disaster. What was Mr Clegg’s game? Was it the behaviour of a fantasist? Of a serial liar? Or someone who plays both ends of an argument, stringing things along while not wishing to accept reality? 

It was, I submit, the behaviour of an irretrievably selfish man who has an amoral disregard for Queen and country. 

One important detail in Mr Clegg’s psychological make-up is his atheism. He proudly declares that he does not believe in God. This is not a man troubled by thoughts of how he may some day be judged. 

He is one of life’s ends-justify-the-means merchants, a creature of Darwinian ambition, happy to do whatever it takes to survive.

The longer the May 2010 negotiations continued, the more the public became furious that election loser Brown was ‘squatting in No 10’. The Brown team understood such anger, but Mr Clegg was greedily unconcerned by it. 

Hypocrisy? Clegg was all in favour of a referendum on changing the electoral system, but is disdainful of letting voters have a say on his beloved EU

He wanted many more days — even weeks — of horse-trading before concluding coalition talks.There used to be a two-word insult thrown at flighty women who toyed with the affections of suitors.

The second word was ‘tease’. Is Nick Clegg a political ‘***** tease’?  Lord Adonis’s compelling account of those dramatic Five Days in May in 2010 fits a pattern of behaviour by Nick Clegg, the some-time Tory public schoolboy who used a family connection to grease his way into a job with European Commissioner Leon Brittan. 

Mr Clegg entered the Commons only in 2005 — handed the safe seat of an obscure Lib Dem MP called Richard Allan (how convenient!), who was later slipped a peerage. 

Nick Clegg often attacks the unelected House of Lords, but we did not hear him criticise it that time.

Hypocrisy? He was all in favour of a referendum on changing the electoral system, but is disdainful of letting voters have a say on his beloved European Union (which he used to work for and which has fattened his pension pot). 

He opposes more rigorous selection in state schools — something that might help under-privileged children — yet was educated at highly selective Westminster School. He calls himself ‘liberal’ yet his stance on newspaper regulation suggests he is an acid enemy of free speech.

This man’s principles are as loose as liquefied gas. Perhaps the worst example of his elasticity is the way he reneged on a policy to make constituency sizes more equal. 

This idea had been long agreed, but Mr Clegg suddenly changed his mind in a pique. 

Westminster is no stranger to shenanigans, but this volte face, which hands Labour an astonishingly anti-democratic advantage in the next election, was an act of rare duplicity.

Will it once more save Nick Clegg? Only last month he mischievously hinted at a possible future pact with Labour if there’s a hung parliament in 2015. Don’t rule it out. 

He has squeaked through so often in his privileged life that it could well happen again.

Don't rule it out: Only last month Nick Clegg mischievously hinted at a possible future pact with Labour if there's a hung parliament in 2015

It happened when he won the Lib Dem leadership in 2007, defeating Chris Huhne thanks to an odd delay to postal ballots. And it happened in 2010, when he became deputy prime minister, even though his party flopped on election day.

Some earn their luck. Others corrupt it to their ends. They  start to view luck as their entitlement, regarding themselves as being somehow impervious to normal rules.

Is there not, in Nick Clegg, an element of France’s Queen Marie Antoinette who said ‘Let them eat cake’? Let the electorate go hang. Politics is for special people like me.

In May 2010, Mr Clegg told Mr Brown to cling on to power so that he, Clegg, could extract a more pro-European deal from the Tories.

The electorate may not like Europe, but half-Dutch Clegg knows Brussels may be his escape route should his Westminster career hit the brick wall.

In that insouciance towards public opinion three Mays ago, he was exposed as an incorrigible Eurocrat, the Brussels sprouter who believes government is for ‘people like him’ and that the great unwashed do not deserve a say on the future of the great project of European federalism.

For the moment, he may have calculated that David Cameron is the one who will get it in the neck if the Coalition Government struggles. Therefore, the more that Mr Clegg behaves in an unreasonable manner, the more it taints Mr Cameron — and the more that will drive Right-wing voters to UKIP which, bingo, splits the Right and makes a Left-wing government more likely. 

And that, in turn, will make it less likely that the British people will get a say on Europe. 

For sly, shrewd Nick Clegg, most incorrigible of Europhiles, that’s perhaps the greatest prize of all, greater even than the keys of Dover House.






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