COUNTERFACTUAL politics can be a fun game to play. What would British politics look like now, if Nick Clegg hadn’t decided to take a long walk with David Cameron in the rose garden and embrace a civil partnership with the Tories in 2010?
Would the political damage still have been as extensive if he hadn’t ratted quite so extravagantly on their tuition fees pledge to the students? Or, having chosen to embrace austerity, and champion it, were the Liberal Democrats always going to be left drifting around the country like Lady Macbeth, ghosts of their former selves, trying to scrub away the political stains, consoling themselves with all the knighthoods, peerages and gongs the party’s “grandees” are past masters at accumulating for themselves?