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The Age Of The Guilty Men

Tony McNulty analyses Nick Clegg's speech and reckons it has shut the door on any future coalition with Labour.

By Tony McNulty

21 Sep 2011, 19:00

In the first of the speeches of this year’s conference season, Nick Clegg gave a very assured performance in front of a party crowd that is still not entirely convinced about the decision to go into government. It was an impressive and confident speech that at the same time managed to be complacent in a quite startling fashion. It was well pitched and designed to reassure the home base. It did so effectively, but without entirely understanding the costs involved.  

The whole speech was Clegg’s justification for joining the coalition – which one would have expected. It contained fairly lukewarm endorsements of many, but not all, of his ministerial colleagues and a clear indication that everything they have done in government has been right. Even tuition fees were discussed in the context of mistakes in presentation and communication – without any notion of apology over the collective signing of the pledge to abolish fees at all. There was barely a mention of the Conservative Party at all and any knockabout or political venom was aimed solely at the Labour Party.

So Clegg can leave Birmingham feeling happier about his position within the party, and safe in the knowledge that the last few days have shown clearly how none of his colleagues come close to having either his stature, or support in the party. Cable is much weakened and increasingly irrelevant; come across as a very weak man, almost irrelevantly going round winking at everyone and saying ‘I told you all about that Rupert!’ Huhne clearly tries but is neither loved nor feared by the party and, indeed, may have other distractions. Hughes and Farron appear to be the necessary and lovable ‘Ant and Dec’ of the Liberal left – ubiquitous, never very funny but sort of necessary to have around like a couple of elderly spinster aunts. For all the attempts of commentators to excite a story over the leadership, none of these characters come close to Clegg. He knows it and, more importantly, they know it too. The only threat to Clegg is from Clegg – hence the nature of today’s speech.

For although well delivered, competent and assured this was ultimately the speech of a leader who felt he was in a weak position. Conference speeches by leaders are notoriously difficult to do well. This is partly because of the varied nature of the task. A good speech allows the leader to talk to his party audience in the conference hall, talk to the party’s broader base in the country through TV and wider media coverage and, literally, to speak to the nation. Good leaders make good speeches that satisfy all three of these demands whilst weaker leaders stay close to home and please the base above all else. For all the confidence, assured delivery and competence of Clegg’s speech – it was for domestic party consumption so fails as a great conference speech.

The assertion and reassertion of a range of Liberal values (including a rather strange value called optimism), the contextualisation of all that the government has done and is to do within these values, the notion that the party took the right difficult decisions at the right time rather than trimming for political gain, and, above all, the constant sniping and attacks on Labour while leaving the Tories alone – were all the ingredients of an internal speech by a leader from a position of weakness. Clegg clearly felt that he had to win over the ‘home’ crowd – the party – and to justify the positions that he had taken in government much more than he had to last year – when everything was still so shiny, novel and new.

I have no doubt that this was the right strategy for him – and it worked. Taking the week as a whole, it was a very successful one for Clegg, in party terms. The party faithful went home happy and at least more convinced about the correctness of being in Government than they were when they arrived. The only real threat to his leadership would have come from a revolt against his entire approach – hence the substance and content of the speech.

On this narrow criteria, the speech worked – but at a cost. Even as Deputy Prime Minister, the occasions when Clegg has the political stage to himself are few and far between and such opportunities needed to be treated as gold dust. Today’s opportunity was wasted. He could have spoken to his base as necessary, but then gone on to speak to the nation, but he didn’t. He failed to reach out to the wider supportive electorate who watched the speech or will follow coverage in the media. He failed to speak to the wider country.

Finally, in a week when some of his colleagues have been keen to make interesting overtures to Labour, in the context of at least keeping the door open for the future, Clegg used this speech to shut the door completely. This was the speech of a man very comfortable in the current coalition and intent on ensuring that his party is only ever in power with the Tories. It would be very difficult for Labour’s ‘backroom boys’, as he describes them, to have anything to do with him at all. He very deliberately slammed the door shut on any future collaboration with Labour – and Labour should seek to decouple the Liberal Democrat Party from its leader. The one certainty of this speech is that it has made sure that Clegg will never be part of a Labour-Liberal Democrat government.

For Labour, this speech marked him out as one of the Guilty Men in an age of guilty men – guilty of sustaining a Conservative-led government and guilty of leading the country down an entirely destructive path. It remains to be seen whether his senior colleagues follow him or otherwise. Given their supine ways this week in Birmingham, then I suspect they surely will.