Nick Clegg - more incompetent as an author than a politician

Reformed arsonist  Clegg  has revealed that he wrote  a "shockingly bad" draft of a novel in his early twenties (to be fair, so did I) .

According to the Independent Clegg said his attempt was inspired by Gabriel Garcia Marquez's The Autumn Of The Patriarch, Acknowledging that his work wouldn't be bothering the Booker Prize jury any time soon, he promised that the 120-page effort "will never see the light of day".

He  added: "I find writing very therapeutic. I would love to emulate the style of one of my favourite writers, J M Coetzee, although I don't think I ever could. But I love that very simple, sparse style – not a single surplus word. It's almost barren; so beautiful."   He also listed Crime And Punishment by Dostoevsky, Lampedusa's The Leopard and Roy Jenkins's biography of William Gladstone among his seven favourite books

Hmm So Clegg has ound something his is worse at than politics. Perhaps if he does try writing that noel he could try a few of these as titles:

Love in the Time of Cameron
Chronicle of a Political Death Foretold
No one Writes to the Deputy Leader
Of Clegg and Other Demons

Or  if he tries to emulate John Maxwell Coetzee

Waiting for the Austerians
The life and Times of Nicholas C
Diary of Some Bad Years, 2010-2014?
The Lives of Liberals


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I learned something new today

 Clegg

For those of my readers who are not familiar with British politics Nick Clegg is the leader of the Libeeral Democrat Party, the third major party in British Politics. It is a long way behind the Tories and the Labour party in the number of seats held and in Scotland and Wales it is the fourth major party" here it is supplanted by the Scottish National Party and Plaid Cymru respectively).

At present it holds 57 seats in the national parliament and is the junior partner in a coalition with the conservatives. The Lib Dem fortunes are on the wane and unless there is a major change in voting intentions it is likely to lose up between 50% and 66%  of its seats at the next election.


But psephology is not the reason for this post. I did not know until a few hours ago that a clegg is a valid English word (Shirley, having a far greater knowledge of of the natural world than I do knew this already).

 clegg

A clegg is in fact describe in the dictionary as a horsefly the females of which will bite humans to suck their blood.

Quite appropriate. Then again if I had to hazard a guess at what a clegg was I would have gone for a horse's arse rather than a horsefly

Mr Pot and Mr Kettle!

Our Deputy PM does not seem to enjoy being reminded that when he was younger he was convicted of arson himself.... (at around 5 minutes into the interview)

The following is from a Daily Mail article (I know I don't usually source info from that rag but this time....)

Oh, the cactus,' he says, placing his head in his hands for a moment, then rubbing his face. 'I just behaved very, very badly. I was on an exchange in Germany and I drank far, far, far too much. I was a teenager. I lost it, really.'


Lost it? He does seem genuinely agitated. 'What I mean is I was drunk...' Yes, he said that. What on? 'They had this beer brewed in monasteries near Munich. Kloster Andechs. Unbelievably strong. Which clearly I couldn't take.'


Clegg was 16 years old, a public schoolboy abroad. So what happened? 'Yeah... I, erm, I was at a party and I drifted into a greenhouse with a friend, saw it was full of cacti and lit a match to find our way, as there were no lights on. The flame accidentally touched one of the cacti, which glowed rather beautifully.'
Was it an accident, then? He looks at me. Only at first, it seems. 'We did that to a fair number of the cacti. Not really knowing what we'd done.' 

I can't help but laugh, at the story and the look on his face, but he objects. He treated this like a joke when, cleverly, he made it public at a fringe meeting in 2007, before the leadership election. He doesn't think it's so funny now. 'No, it's not... I mean, genuinely.It was the leading collection of cacti in Germany.'

The greenhouse belonged to a professor of botany whose life's work had been to gather and nurture exotic specimens from all over the world. 'He'd been to the jungles of Brazil and stuff to find these cacti.'

The boys weren't arrested, because they ran away. 'We didn't know what we were doing. We were teenagers, we'd drunk too much - frankly, we did behave appallingly, irresponsibly, criminally. Next morning, one of the organisers of the exchange rang me up and said, "We know you did this." I came clean.' 

 I doubt,somehow, that he would have if he wasn't confronted...

 Make of this what you will. Cjearly arson is no bar to progression so perhaps there is hope for some of the looters yet....

The interview excerpt is from: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/moslive/article-1193693/Id-drunk-I-irresponsible-Criminal-Nick-Clegg-regrets.html#ixzz1Uq9TGpTt

Cleggawber says to councils “Please don’t sack people so fast – something will turn up”

Nick Clegg on walkabout

Despite the fact that councils are to face huge spending cuts over the next few years, the Government is advising local authorites not to be too hasty in making compulsory redundancies over fears that local authorities are moving prematurely to sack staff.

According to the Guardian the Local Government Association said this week that around 100,000 local government jobs would be lost as a result of the comprehensive spending review.

Nick Clegg, the deputy prime minister, said: "How local authorities are anticipating these cuts is wildly different from one place to the next. Sheffield City Council is making massive efforts to deal with a very tight settlement and minimise enforced redundancies. Go to other places and you get a reaction that 'it's all the government's fault and I'm going to reach for the redundancy notice'.

"What we need to do is to play our part in central government, to try and show local authorities and others that they shouldn't immediately start issuing redundancy notices for savings that they can phase in over four years and where, through voluntary redundancies, natural wastage and so on, maybe the pressure isn't quite as great as they initially think it to be."

Maybe the pressure is not as great as it could be? It sounds as if Clegg is emulating Mr Micawber with the view that something will turn up,. Local councils facing huge cuts have little option but to shed staff and in huge numbers.

Perhaps Cleggawber was thinking of another quote form the same character:

Welcome poverty!..Welcome misery, welcome houselessness, welcome hunger, rags, tempest, and beggary! Mutual confidence will sustain us to the end!


Mutual confidence that Clegg has the Ministerial car and the trappings of office until his party faces meltdown in a few years time