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The collective bullying of the Lib Dem leader is bad for our democracy. Is it just a reaction to the end of the honeymoon?
It would be barmy and blasphemous, on Friday of all days, to seriously compare Nick Clegg with Jesus Christ. Google the words "crucify" and "Clegg", nevertheless, and you discover that more people than you might suppose have been there already. Listen to Handel's Messiah, moreover, and it is hard not to be reminded of the Liberal Democrat leader's predicament. "He was despised." Indeed he is. "Despised and rejected." That too. "Rejected of men." In ever greater numbers. And by women too, though not by quite such a large margin, if the polls are right.
What truly explains the intensity of this public hatred? The answers people give imply that the response is rational. Going in with the Tories. Hijacking what ought to be a Tory government (there are Cleggophobes on the right as well as the left, remember). Breaking his election promises. Tuition fees. Cuts. All real stuff for which Clegg and his party are answerable at the ballot box on 5 May.
But there is a disjunction here. The depth of the loathing Clegg triggers is disproportionate to the offence he is deemed to have committed. In each case there is a rational though not necessarily a satisfactory explanation for his conduct: the only viable coalition was with the Tories; coalitions necessitate policy compromises; university finance is unsustainable without student fees; the deficit had to be addressed somehow.
Clegg's courses of action may have been politically unwise. He may not be a skilled politician. Some of what he has done may be downright wrong. I can agree with all that. But the over-reaction to it has gone beyond rational or proportionate. It does not justify the emotion that so many now feel or the word that so many now use about Clegg, seemingly without a second's thought – hatred.
We need to confront this willingness to express hatred more severely than we do. "Hate Clegg – No to AV" is increasingly the antis' message in the referendum campaign. Hate Clegg? I don't doubt that people mean it when they say it. But most normal people are not haters. Hatred is a wild, raw and dangerous emotion and not, by and large, a constructive one.
There is a very good reason why hate, and what flows from it, is so often against the law. Hate is responsible for more misery and wickedness than almost any politician, however hated, has ever inflicted. In fact it is difficult to think of a single arena in which hate is healthy. Ask the manager of Glasgow Celtic. Why, then, what sometimes seems like such pride in hating Clegg?
Hatred has always had a place in politics. But it has rarely been a productive one. Few of those who trumpet their hatred of Clegg would presumably be comfortable with a campaign based on hatred of Muslims, black people or women. Or even hatred of the middle class. When Aneurin Bevan described the Tories in 1948 as worse than vermin, one newspaper dubbed him "the man who hates 8,093,858 people". Bevan's career never entirely recovered. But even he did not mount an entire campaign on the basis of hatred of one party leader. That is what is happening now, both in the AV referendum campaign and even in party politics more generally. And it is not good for democracy or trust.
Hatred, or the expression of something purporting to be hatred, is relatively unusual in mainstream electoral politics but it is becoming increasingly common. Disraeli and Gladstone may not have been able to stand the sight of one another, but their parties did not campaign on the basis of Tories hating Gladstone or Liberals hating Disraeli. Labour undoubtedly felt betrayed by Ramsay Macdonald after 1931, but it did not focus its campaigning on attacking him. The Tories never liked Harold Wilson, but it would be a stretch to say they really hated him.
Margaret Thatcher. Now we're talking. Thatcher was hated by many, as well as loved by others. But she was a knowingly and deliberately divisive politician, of a kind thankfully rare in our history. She was confrontational by conviction and instinct. It was a day for celebration when she had to quit. Yet even hatred of Thatcher was a two-edged sword. Some of it was mysogynistic. Some of it snobbish. Bits of it were violent. And there was little to love or admire about those whose hatred of her was strongest.
Today's political hate-figures aren't like that, in this country anyway. In many ways the reverse. The two who stand out in modern times for many on the left, Clegg and Tony Blair, are not confrontational like Thatcher. Both are politicians of the centre, not of the extremes. Both had a wide initial appeal. Indisputably, each did things in government that were wrong, foolish and unsuccessful, using up their political capital in the process. But it is almost as if their later pariah status is in some way a remorseful public reaction to the earlier honeymoon. That says something about us, as well as about them.
This is not in any sense to seek to defend the indefensible – especially the self-inflicted indefensible – in the men's records. Nor is it to underrate the extent to which modern politics continues to face a democratic crisis that is partly, especially on expenses, of its own making. But it is to say that we do not cut modern politicians enough slack.
Modern politicians, Clegg included, are all grappling with the superhumanly difficult business of governing complex modern societies successfully, justly and wisely – and then getting re-elected, all in the constant and unforgiving spotlight of a modern media of unprecedented hostility. If that was an easy thing to do, someone would have done it. But no one has.
Pretending to hate politicians is cheap. It makes good copy. Lazy copy. But it is a denial of how life is lived most of the time. And it is certainly a denial of how it ought to be lived. All of us say we hate things when we don't really mean it. You do. I do. But do I really hate Arsenal, Prince Charles, First Capital Connect and bankers' bonuses as much as I sometimes say I do? Well, maybe bankers' bonuses. But not the rest.
The thing we really hate, I suspect, is the difficulty of getting hard things right rather than those who grapple with them. Yet we take it out on the hate figures. This only makes the difficulties greater, not least by implying that there is some obvious solution to hand which the politicians are wilfully ignoring. Handel's Messiah, quoting the Book of Isaiah, speaks to this collective failing with unrivalled power: "The Lord hath laid on him the iniquity of us all." Once again though, they could be talking about the increasingly hapless Clegg.