Defining Nick Clegg (or at least a kind of Cleggous phenomenology)

So Nick “Your Vote” Clegg has been at it again.  You know, lying, backsliding, you know the drill.  Longish ago, in the general election, his words about the NHS, tuition fees, and pretty much everything else that rolled off his slivery tongue have been contradicted by what he's since done. Back then, he was turned by the Bullingdon-wing of the Tory Party.  More recently, yesterday in fact, it turns out he originally intended in a speech to refer to opponents of equal marriage as bigots.  When found out, though, he said it was a “mistake” and that in fact he wouldn’t “insult” a spade by calling it a spade. To add a layer of irony to the otherwise simply twattish, this time he was turned by the traditional-(anti-gay)-marriage-defending-wing of a Church that was founded by a priapic syphilitic for the purpose of obtaining a divorce in order to produce a male heir to a throne he sat on to such tyrannical effect, and that was then re-founded by a “Virgin Queen” who never got married.  And there it is, Clegg-world in a nutshell, an absolutely batshit nutshell.  (Yes, I meant slivery.)

Of course, the original broken election promises are the worst of all the Cleggfucks we’ve been subjected to since that election.  In that campaign he made commitments that many people (myself included) voted for, and has since done the opposite of what those people gave him a mandate for.  He has thus done violence to democracy itself, as well as terrible damage to the people The Collaboration has committed itself to hurting to immeasurable but indubitably enormous effect.  (For a previous critique of a FibDem and an explanation of that term you can go to: http://stevesarson.blogspot.co.uk/2011/08/danny-alexander-and-pathetic-drivelling.html.)  And while dedicated Liberal Democrats (by which I mean people dedicated to the Liberal Democratic Party, but who clearly don’t give a Tom Tit about liberality or democracy) will continue to vote for whatever their leaders claim to believe in next time around, I don’t think any voters who voted for them on the basis of their purported principles will be doing so again. At least as long as Nick Your Vote Clegg and all his fellow collaborators are in charge (including Vince This is My Power Cable).  But it does of course raise once again the question of who is Nick Clegg?  Or, rather, who is Nick Clegg today?  Because, for sure, being “Nick Clegg” is, at any one time, an entirely temporary condition.  So the question is actually quite pointless, except in as much as it throws up opportunities for pointing and laughing, which, we can safely presume, will remain a legal activity for as long as Nick Clegg doesn’t promise that it will.

So, who is Nick Clegg?  Let’s try to define Clegg, but just, as I say, for a bit of a laugh.  Certainly, the kindest things you can say about him are that he’s open-minded, receptive to new ideas, flexible, and likes working with others.  These might well be suitable and indeed desirable qualities in the right circumstances, such as being a fictional or at least fictionalised character in a satirical sitcom that skewers the amorality and consequent hypocrisies of certain types of power-hungry politicians.  Although preferably not one written by Armando Iannucci, a satirist who now sells his wares to Sky, which perhaps finally unlocks the mystery of how it is that the characters he creates are such perfect incarnations of amorality and hypocrisy.  Sadly, however, Clegg’s qualities are entirely unsuited and indeed are or ought to be absolutely antithetical to being an actual party-leader in a real-world democracy.  Indeed, in these respects he’s about useful as Iannuccism is as a political philosophy, or even as a serious as well as piss-taking (i.e. properly satirical) critique of politics.  For more and much greater expertise on Iannuccian politics, in fact anti-politics, see: http://nottspolitics.org/2012/06/18/the-anti-politics-of-the-thick-of-it/

But, just because defining “Clegg” as Clegg is pointless, on account what we might also generously refer to as his mercuriality, doesn’t mean we can’t use the word “Clegg” as a prefix (or for that matter a suffix, but I’m going here with prefix) for all kinds of things that are Cleggacious; that is, things that reflect the characteristics of Nick Clegg.  Politicians’ names have long been used for their illustrative qualities beyond their immediate context but still in related contexts, sometimes in metaphorical and other allusory fashions.  Thus “Machiavellian” needn’t just narrowly refer to a Florentine renaissance philosopher’s expertise in high-order, low-down political chicanery, but can also refer more broadly to unscrupulous shenanigans in modern politics, office politics, business more widely, and in the administration of football associations. And just as “Stalinist” refers most directly to a ruthless dictator who murderously attempted to control all aspects of life in the old Soviet Union, it might also refer to a particularly odious ex- who tried to supervise every moment of your time, monitored your communications, and burned photographs of your previous partners.  It is in these latter spirits that I think we can define “Clegg” the word, if not Clegg the man, and try to identify an essence of Clegg, a Cleggness, perhaps even a kind of meta-Clegg, or a sort of phenomenology of the Cleggous.

Cleggot: one who claims to oppose bigotry and bullying until confronted by bigots and bullies, whereupon he or she (he) teams up with bigots and bullies.

Clegg (verb form): 1. To obtain votes by deception.  2. An inconvenient bodily motion associated with a particular kind of frightening incident, as in “The new boy promised to protect Tom and Scud from the beastly bullies, but then the fiendish Flashman appeared and, alas, the poor chap clegged his pants.”  3. The act of abandoning your erstwhile friends in an unprincipled and cowardly fashion.  As in, “The new boy promised to help Tom and Scud protect the tuck shop in which all the lads had invested together, but when Flashman and his friends came along he clegged-it as quickly as he could (although bearing in mind that he’d also clegged himself, his gait had a rather awkward prospect!), leaving his former friends overwhelmed and the greedy fiends free to steal everyone else’s goodies.”

Cleggottery: unlike a lottery, which has constant rules and in which everyone has an equal chance of winning and losing, a cleggottery has rules that change once the game is over, to the effect that all the winnings are then given to bankers and their political enablers, all ex-private schoolboys with vast amounts of inherited wealth originally generated by off-shore no-tax schemes.

Cleggervane: A sort of a-moral compass that at one moment follows the direction of the wind, but which, when manipulated by evil forces, turns at a Clegg-Angle.

Clegg-Angle: an angle of exactly 180-degrees, and, in fact, therefore, not actually an “angle” at all.

Cleggebrae: an internal apparently skeletal structure than can give an organism an appearance of considerable substance, but which is illusory, and so the organism will in fact quickly decay into insubstantiality. That is, what bananas are made of that makes them look all firm and yellow and lovely to begin with but then turns them into a shitty-looking mush of transcendental hideousness.   

     

Cleggeology: a specialist field within the discipline of geology that explores illusory and unstable terrestrial phenomena such as mirages, shifting ground, and quicksand.

Cleoggology: a kind of secular theology that involves the study of ineffable phenomena, self-contradicting pseudo-philosophies, and charming prophecies that will never be fulfilled.

Clegguistics: the ability to speak on all levels of untruth in many different languages.

Post-clegguistics: the inability to speak any kind of truth in any language.

Cleggygraph: a kind of polygraph that can see into the future and is thus equipped to unmask those who can lie so convincingly that only events that have not yet happened can uncover their mendacity.  Unfortunately, the cleggygraph is still only at a conceptual level of development, and so for now voters (and, if only vote-stealing was actually a crime, the police) must continue to make judgments based on Cleggsperience.

Cleggsperience: the fact of having been lied to on such a scale that you could never possibly believe the particular chubby-faced interlocutor again. It can lead to feelings of incleggulousness, to which only the cleggulous are immune.   

Incleggulous: a feeling of shock at a betrayal of such transparency and moral enormity that is beyond the relatively innocuous feeling of mere incredulousness.  As in, “Oh my God! I thought I was voting for a socially progressive political platform as expressed in the official Xxxxxxx-Xxxxxxxx Party Manifesto, but in government they are betraying their democratic promises and are actually dismantling the very fabric of the civil society I believe in and upon which all things decent and just must depend. I am absolutely incleggulous!”

    

Cleggulous: the ability to be fooled a second time by someone who has already proven themselves to be a most fantastical liar.  This ability represents such an extreme form of delusion that it is in fact a form of mental disability, although experts are divided on whether or not it actually constitutes an illness.  Nevertheless, the degree of intellectual debility required to be medically certifiable as cleggulous was illustrated by George W. Bush when he said, as he did in Nashville, Tennessee, on 17 September 2002, “Fool me once, shame on, shame on you. Fool me -- you can’t get fooled again.”

Cleggology: an apology that is so breath-takingly ill-judged and of such staggering inadequacy that absolutely no one takes it in the least bit seriously and all everyone can do is laugh, mock, and make spoof youtube videos out of it.