One reason that Nick Clegg’s impact remains strong is the power of numbers.
One reason that Nick Clegg’s impact remains strong is the power of numbers. At the last election, Labour retained office with an enormous overall majority, but only 9,562,122 votes. You have to go back to the era before women had the vote to find such a small backing for the party which won outright. Worse, you will never find such a low proportion of those entitled to vote producing the victor. Last time, only 22 per cent of the total electorate voted Labour. In 1992, the Conservatives got more than 14 million votes, and in 1997, Tony Blair’s New Labour got almost as many. So if, next week, any party gets an overall majority with fewer than 10 million votes, people will doubt its legitimacy. Yes, the system will ‘work’, and a government will be formed, but protest will not be stilled. If David Cameron is Prime Minister, he would be rash not to find a way of assuaging the anger.
The morning after Greece’s debt was given junk status, I rang an English friend who is doing up a house in Corfu. The night before, he told me, he had gone round with his Greek agent to the local ironmonger to inspect a metal table there. The ironmonger’s elderly assistant showed him the table, which he decided he did not want, and then fell into discussion with the agent about something else. My friend’s attention wandered. Suddenly he noticed that the assistant was waving a spanner menacingly under his nose, and shouting ‘Twenty-nine years at sea! I was 29 years at sea!’ So my friend turned to his agent, who was laughing, and said, ‘What on earth did you tell him about me?’ ‘I told him,’ said the agent, ‘that you were Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the head of the IMF, and that you had come to take away his pension.’
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