One last pop at Simon Jenkins

I'm going to retire Jenkins from consideration in the competition for arsehole of the week, month or year. Unlike the laughably predictable Polly Toynbee, Jenkins sometimes writes something insightful: but he has such a dull, pedestrian 60s mind-set that he is just a fish in a barrel, not worth shooting.

The Nameless Libertarian (Appalling Strangeness) has saved me the trouble of taking apart Jenkins' article on Nick Clegg. Jenkins' key paragraph  dripped with condescension:

Clegg the politician was a nice chap. He could have made a good departmental minister. Back in May he could have decided otherwise, standing aloof from office and declaring that his party would debate and vote on each government measure on its merits. That would have been a true Liberal Democrat dawn, from which he could have returned perhaps more successfully to fight the Tories at the polls.

To which the Nameless Libertarian crushingly replies:

This notion that the Lib Dems could have chosen a third way (no pun intended) of voting on each issue as and when they arise rather than going into coalition is a non-starter. All that would have happened is that Cameron would have gone to the country again sooner rather than later. His party was the only one with the funds to fight another election, and both the Tories and Labour would have a massive stick with which to beat the Lib Dems - that a vote for the Lib Dems is a vote for unstable government and for political instability.

Perfectly obvious to anyone who understands the mechanics of politics at the time and since. Which leads one to the inescapable conclusion that Jenkins has learned nothing from a lifetime of observing British politics. As Chiang Kai-shek once observed of the monocle affected by British officials, Jenkins's world view is pathetically circumscribed because he does not wish to see more than he can understand.