Why Britain Has Fallen Out of Love with Nick Clegg

Nick Clegg's rise was spectacular. And if you've been reading the British papers, you might well conclude that his fall from grace has been at least as dramatic. Last year, in the run-up to the May 2010 elections, the Liberal Democrat leader briefly became Britain's most popular politician since Winston Churchill, thanks to his appealing performances in the debates — and his good fortune in belonging to neither the tarnished incumbent Labour Party nor its mistrusted main challengers, the Conservatives. Now he's widely depicted as a busted flush. On Jan. 7, his 44th birthday, he woke to a poll suggesting that Lib Dem support had crashed from 34% at the height of the so-called Cleggmania ahead of the general elections to just 7%, its lowest ebb in 20 years.

Cleggmania has inexorably given way to a process one might be tempted to call Cleggradation that has seen Clegg serially mocked by comics, targeted by student protesters and rejected by onetime celebrity supporters like Colin Firth. The actor is tipped to take away a Golden Globe Sunday, Jan. 16, for his role in The King's Speech, set in wartime Britain as a reluctant King George VI overcomes his queasiness and ascends the throne to serve the national interest. Clegg's party, by contrast, is expected to collect a booby prize in the by-election being held Thursday, Jan. 13, in the northern English constituency of Oldham East and Saddleworth, where, as in the rest of the country, support for the Lib Dems has curdled.

That seems harsh, especially if you accept that the Lib Dem leader overcame queasiness about entering the coalition with the Conservatives because he believed doing so was in the national interest. Voters had returned the country's first hung Parliament since 1974 at a particularly critical time for the British economy. "Britain was teetering on the edge of a sovereign debt crisis," Clegg said in a Jan. 10 interview with the BBC. "I went into [the coalition] with my eyes open."

Clegg understood that any party sharing responsibility for inflicting an austerity regime on the nation was unlikely to enjoy a long honeymoon; he knew that an alliance with the Conservatives, still linked in the public mind with the pain of Margaret Thatcher's belt-tightening measures in the 1980s, would be unpalatable to many of his colleagues. But he may not have anticipated the strength of anger his key role as Deputy Prime Minister would unleash among Lib Dems. Indeed, he might have expected a little gratitude. After all, the Lib Dems' participation in Britain's ruling coalition marks a rare interlude in government for a party that has largely been consigned to opposition since the early 1930s.

So why Clegg's transition from hero to zero? There are several reasons. Lib Dem policy pivots, especially regarding university tuition fees, have been clumsily handled. Clegg's determination to show unity with his Conservative coalition partners at the expense of defining his own party's distinct mission has helped fuel a growing — and false — suspicion that Clegg is a closet Conservative. But the beleaguered pol's fundamental mistake was probably to assume that the majority of Liberal Democrat voters actually wanted to see the party in power, with all the messy pragmatism that position entails.

In the past, the perennially third-placed party made general election pledges that were never tested — and were never likely to be. In an era when politics is a dirty word and politicians command even less trust than journalists or real estate agents, voters could still feel good about putting their cross next to a party of high ideals. That is why so many Lib Dem supporters feel betrayed by the compromises the party leadership has struck since entering office. One such, expected to be confirmed in the coming days, could see Liberal Democrats abandoning demands for the scrapping of control orders used against suspected terrorists and instead standing behind plans to reform the control-orders regimen.

The price exacted by the Conservatives for their agreement to a May 5 referendum on changing the way the U.K. elects its Parliament was steep. The Liberal Democrats have long argued for replacing Britain's first-past-the-post voting system with proportional representation (PR). Their Conservative partners wish to retain first-past-the-post — and remain implacably opposed to PR — but accepted a plebiscite that will offer another option: an Alternative Vote (AV) system in which voters list candidates in order of preference. If the 2010 parliamentary elections had taken place under an AV system, the Lib Dems would have won 22 additional seats. If the election were rerun tomorrow, no matter what the voting system, opinion polls suggest the Lib Dems would suffer a wipeout.

The irony, of course, is that the Lib Dem dream of PR would inevitably lead to more coalitions, more consensual politics — more of the compromises, in other words, that Lib Dem voters reject. A Jan. 11 poll revealed that 33% of people who voted Lib Dem in 2010 now say they'd vote Labour. When the seat of Oldham East and Saddleworth was contested last May, Labour beat the Lib Dems by a mere 103 votes. Labour's victory was later annulled by the courts after evidence that its candidate had smeared the reputation of his Lib Dem rival, Elwyn Watkins. In the circumstances, Watkins might be expected to win the resulting by-election handsomely. Instead, it looks likely that he'll suffer a decisive loss to a different Labour candidate. The Lib Dems are also afraid that they may fail to persuade Britons to opt for reform in May's AV referendum and could suffer major losses in local-government and Scottish Parliament elections scheduled for the same day. Party colleagues are already lining up to blame Clegg for the feared debacle.

No wonder the politician sounded plaintive as he listed in his BBC interview the unsung achievements of his time in office: "the things that make me passionate about politics," such as an increased income-tax threshold for lower earners, a "pupil premium" allocating extra money to schools that enroll disadvantaged children who need extra help, and progress toward electoral reform. He might also have added a promised redrawing of Britain's libel laws, one of few moves to win him plaudits in recent times. "Clegg is definitely tapping into a political opportunity but also a public desire, both for constitutional reform in the U.K. and also for a reassessment of the relationship between liberty and security, which the Labour government woefully misread with its intensely authoritarian tendencies," says John Kampfner, chief executive of the campaigning organization Index on Censorship.

Yet if Clegg is using power to achieve some liberal goals, public attention remains trained on what he has not achieved. "These are the big shifts in British life which I accept don't, in a sense, present themselves to people immediately," he said.

His best hope is for that recognition to come before the next election — which, if the coalition holds together and its bill introducing five-year, fixed-term Parliaments passes into law, won't take place until May 2015. But he might get help from one of those big shifts in British life that may not have presented itself to people immediately. Even under Britain's existing electoral system, the sway of the two biggest parties has diminished. Labour won power under Tony Blair in 1997 and retained it until last year by building a consensus that extended beyond the party's shrinking core vote. David Cameron's Conservatives invited the Lib Dems into coalition after failing to repeat the same trick. No matter whether or not Britons opt for AV, voting trends presage an increasing likelihood of hung Parliaments in the future. Liberal Democrat supporters may dislike the realities of the consensual politics their party has always claimed to champion, but they should learn to live with them.