The Best Misdirection Joke Ever Told

Here at You Didn't Win, we've been pretty consistent in directing our anger at the current government's decisions against the man who, let's face it, makes them: David Cameron. Occasionally, we also include Dave's loyal sidekick, Chancellor of the Exchequer George 'Gideon' Osborne, in our attacks: the coalition is stealing our money and giving it to bankers and George is, after all, the bagman in this little caper. But, by and large, we've kept aloof from what's currently the most popular bloodsport in current political commentary: beating Nick Clegg repeatedly like a human pinata covered in Lib Dem rosettes.

Others, however, have wholeheartedly joined in the Clegg Abuse. We think this is a mistake; below, Neil Ackerman, one of our new Guest Bloggers explains why. - AJ

When David Cameron responded to the fact he had named Nick Clegg as his favourite joke, I don't think even he realised how right he was. Most of the anger aimed in demonstrations over the past year seems to have been aimed at the best joke Cameron ever told. While yes, the feeling of betrayal from Lib Dem supporters may be justified; and yes, promises have been solidly broken; and yes, Nick Clegg has made some monumental judgement errors, where is the criticism of Cameron?

There are people asking questions of him, and since Nick Clegg pulled on his big boy pants and disagreed with him over AV I think this will continue and grow. However, it does seem that most of the questions that Cameron and co. should be answering are being directed towards the Lib Dems and Clegg. Cameron should not be under-estimated; he is exceedingly clever. He has made a man who seemed weak and naïve, but kinda cute, into a man who seems weak and naïve but no longer cute. Clegg is now a dangerous and evil liar who must be stopped. For a young generation claiming to be politically savvy, we have fallen for the most basic trick in the book: “he did it”.

But Clegg didn't do it. Cameron is behind the cuts, Cameron raised tuition fees, Cameron is making changes to education that will damage social mobility for decades to come. Guess what, we're falling for it again, the most basic tricks in the book. He is waving the hand puppet of Clegg manically while quietly doing everything that matters with the other hand. Anyone who's ever done any kind of basic magic trick knows how misdirection works; and as I said earlier, Cameron is not to be under-estimated. He and those behind him are masters at magic tricks and have found the perfect misdirection instrument for us in Clegg.

It can't be assumed that in the next election all the disgruntled Lib Dem voters are going to go with Labour and that the Tories are going to go crashing out with a nationwide yell of “Jenga!”. Recent local council elections in England showed that the Tories are getting Lib Dem votes too. Labour made themselves incredibly unpopular, so the three main parties are all in the dog house. The Tories just haven't been in power long enough to be in there properly, so what's to stop much of the Lib Dem vote going to the Tories? Sitting in Scotland the whole idea of doing that seems unrealistic, but England is not Scotland, and Scotland's vote doesn't particularly matter in Westminster as can be made obvious by looking at the election map.

But Clegg made it all possible, right? No. If the Lib Dems hadn't formed the coalition with the Tory party, a coalition made up of Labour and all the independents and smaller parties would have been so weak it wouldn't have lasted a week. The Lib Dem choice took many, including myself, completely be surprise and many, including myself, were very angry. However, if you were in Clegg's boots, what would you have done? Suddenly you have the chance to be in power, a thing beyond your wildest dreams on the run up to the election. A very seductive Cameron says you can get your AV referendum, and after support from some big names and players over the election campaign you feel cocky. Also, if you're Clegg, you've probably not slept in 48 hours. A few months in and you realise the winning feeling you had at the start has just turned horribly Charlie Sheen.

I'm sure we can all remember going to a party when we were kids: parents have gone away for the week, it's summertime so nobody has school, the person you fancy is going and you just bought some snazzy new jeans. Everything is going well. Suddenly you realise nobody has any alcohol and nobody is old enough to actually buy any. What do you do? You find someone who either has fake ID or who is old enough to buy alcohol and phone them pretending to be their best friend. An hour later they arrive like a hero returning from a Spartan war with their shield of clinking carrier bags. Everybody makes awkward conversation with them for about half an hour before ignoring them. Suddenly the unsuspecting buyer of the alcohol realises nobody actually likes them at the party; they have just been invited to make the whole thing possible. They then spend the rest of the night watching a bunch of kids have fun then vomit all over one another.

Clegg is now a lonely figure in a dark corner of a party that he shouldn't have been invited to in the first place. All the while he's digging a grave for his party with a shovel bought for him by his “new best friend” Cameron, tied in a pretty blue ribbon. Little does he know that when the parents get back and find their best vase broken and their child in hospital with alcohol poisoning, he's the one who's getting the blame.

Everybody Knows

In our last post, we looked at the surprising breadth of support for our central proposition - that David Cameron did not win the 2010 election. Left-wing blogger Lisa Ansell and Telegraph columnist Benedict Brogan both wrote separate pieces explaining, respectively, that no-one had won the election, and that Cameron's problems today stem from his failure to win.

Today, reading through my Kindle edition of the New Statesman, I came across not one but two examples of commentators once again reflecting our opinion - again, from across the political spectrum. In an exclusive interview with Nick Clegg, the Marty Janetty to Cameron's Shawn Michaels, guest editor Jemima Khan (who happens to be the sister of Tory MP Zac Goldsmith, so can hardly be thought of as a red-blooded socialist partisan) opines that

'the British public voted - no one party won'

although she also charitably observes that Cameron has won at least one thing - a game of tennis against Clegg.

In the very same issue, however, Hugh Grant turns the tables on News of the World executive Paul McMullan by secretly taping a conversation with him on a great many subjects, including the degree to which Cameron may well be beholden to News International:

'basically, Cameron is very much in debt to Rebekah Wade for helping him not quite win the election'

(emphasis ours, obviously).

A high-flying socialite and a gutter-dwelling hack; the (guest) editor of Britain's best-selling left-wing weekly and a former exec at the News of the Screws. You couldn't get much further apart than Jemima Khan and Paul McMullan, but on one thing they agree: David Cameron may be the PM now - but he didn't win the 2010 election.

Jemima Khan knows. Paul McMullan knows. Lisa Ansell and Benedict Brogan know. Even Nick Clegg seems to know (though he's probably too afraid of getting a chinese burn from Eric Pickles to say so openly). The only people who seem not to know are Cameron and Osborne, gloating about the 'political capital [that] comes from winning an election'. Clearly, the Bullingdon boys need a reminder. And, this May 6th, when they open their post, we'll make sure they are reminded!

But hang on - didn't they win?

Today has been a good day for our campaign. A retweet from the fantastic comedian Josie Long led to an explosion in other people retweeting us and following. Most of the comments from people about the project have been positive, and it's clear that our plan to admonish the Tories for crowing about 'winning' an election when they couldn't form a sufficient parliamentary majority to form a government on their own has really struck a chord with the public.

Not everyone feels the same way, however. Some have questioned the basis of what we're doing on the oldest grounds in politics: that we're being unrealistic. That objecting to the sight of a trust-fund millionaire claiming that a budget of swingeing cuts is justified on the basis that his party 'won' the election is immature. That we should  just put up with it, in fact, because this is the system and that's just how it works.

Except that that isn't how our electoral system works. The First Past the Post (FPTP) system of elections in Britain - whatever you may think of it in the light of the coming AV referendum - is designed to produce clear winners. In fact, this is one of the main justifications of FPTP in the eyes of those who endorse it as a system. FPTP is designed to lead to parties emerging with a clear majority in the Commons, even if they don't poll a majority of the national vote. Unfair? Perhaps. But decisive. FPTP leads to strong government because, most of the time, it produces a convincing victor.

Except when it doesn't.

FPTP is meant to be coalition-proof. So when it does produce a coalition, it's a sign that something's wrong. A sign that the public has lost confidence in those who claim to govern it. Undoubtedly, the public lost confidence in Labour at the last election. But the failure of the Tories to secure enough seats to form a majority government indicates that large sections of the population have no confidence in their abilities or agenda either.

The good showing the Liberal Democrats made on the back of Nick Clegg's surprisingly strong performance in the televised debates was, in its way, an illustration of how little faith the electorate placed, at that point, in the two main parties. Clegg seemed like something new: the banality of New Labour at its most moribund, of David Cameron's reheated Thatcherism and truisms about the deficit, threw Clegg, with his fresh style, touch of honesty and offer of something new, into sharp relief. The collapse in support for the Lib Dems in the aftermath of Clegg's shock decision to form a coalition with the Tories is a relection of how this sense of possibility has been so desperately squandered.

The sad truth of the 2010 General Election is that it was the election no-one won.

David Cameron's Tories, with the support of the Murdoch press, the clamour of sockpuppet pressure groups like the Taxpayer's Alliance, and the deference of a cowed BBC, were predicted to sweep into power on the back of a landslide akin to that enjoyed by Tony Blair in 1997. Instead, they only managed to gain a 48-seat majority - far short of the numbers they would need to govern on their own.

Labour, despite having averted total economic meltdown in the banking crisis, and having introduced some of the most progressive legislation since the postwar Atlee government in the course of their longest ever reign, were hamstrung by their very association with the crash, by their authoritarian attitude to civil liberties in the pursuance of the 'war on terror', by the catastrophic misjudgement of the Iraq war, and by the tabloid-fanned public perception of Gordon Brown. They did better than almost anyone predicted - but they, too, did not win.

And the Lib Dems came within a hair's breadth of being able to wield the real balance of power by offering 'supply and confidence' support to a minority Tory government - but threw it away to join one of the most ill-judged coalitions in political history, and have haemorrhaged support at the hands of an electorate hungry to punish what it sees as a betrayal. They lost too.

And so did we. As a result of the election no-one won, the British public now face an unprecedented barriage of cuts - cuts which even the Tories now admit go beyond the wildest dreams of Thatcher. Millions will lose out while bankers celebrate with even greater bonuses. The concept of a good education and meaningful adult employment is now further outside the realms of possibility for working class youth than at any time since before the Second World War. The Lib Dems, who seemed to offer so much hope to a demoralised electorate, are now seen as the most reviled members of a universally-pilloried political class. Now more than ever, Parliament seems like a rich man's plaything. After a few windows were smashed during last month's anti-cuts protests, media commentators and establishment figures fell over each other to clutch their pearls and ask how there could be such an orgy of violence. This writer looks around and wonders how there was so little.

For the Tories to claim that they 'won' the election is a slap in the face to the already demoralised people of this country, a populace who know - as the speed with which our campaign has caught on proves - that talk of victory in the context of such an inconclusive ballot is shallow triumphalism. If the Tories truly want to calm tensions and act for the good of the nation, then they need to show some humility and acknowledge how deeply they and their policies have divided and demoralised the country. And they could begin to do that by acknowledging what we already know - that neither they, nor anyone else, 'won' the 2010 election.

And if they refuse - then we're here to remind them.