the brilliantly leaping gazelle

I’ve always been highly suspicious of the Liberal Democrats and it’s a suspicion that their leader, Mr Ed, proved to be fully justified.

Not just because of the fact that when they knew they had no chance of ever constituting anything approaching an effective political force, they promised all manner of things to woo the electorate. They were like the ‘Goldilocks’ of British politics, inasmuch as they were like the Conservatives but not too much like Conservatives and they were like Labour but not too much like Labour. They were something different – which was important when your trying to impress your middle-class friends that you too were different – although what exactly that difference was, wasn’t exactly clear. Their seemingly intentional vagueness didn’t help matters for me so I never understood the point of them actually. To my way of thinking, why didn’t a voter either spoil the ballot paper or be just be honest and secretly vote Conservative anyway.

They were partly defined by what they weren’t. They had beliefs, but not what one might call a central unifying one, one that could be summed up in a sentence and was elegantly simple. The Conservatives were – and still are – for example, are pro-business, pro minimal state regulation, pro-monarchy and pro-privatisation. Labour were pro-workers rights, pro-trade unions, pro-welfare state, and pro-state intervention for the common good. Butt now? Who knows? But with the Lib Dems one never knew, possibly because they weren’t treated by the media as ever likely to be anything other than good sports for making the effort.

But whilst they had successfully managed to inveigle themselves into the electorates collective consciousness as the decent political party, all of that credibility that they’d built up over the years, was exposed expedient posturing in a quite breathtaking act of political opportunism. After the 2010 general election, where no one party was able to form a majority government, some hurried negotiations took place, which saw many Lib Dem manifesto pledges being jettisoned in ‘the national interest’ of having to form a coalition government with the Conservatives.

What might have been in the national interest certainly wasn’t in theirs .No one trusted them anymore and with good reason. The Tories used them as a political fig leaf. And gave rise to the joke, “Why did Nick Clegg cross the road?”, “Because he said he wouldn’t.” The curtain had been pulled back and revealed them be as ethically dubious they had always claimed they weren’t. But somehow even that disastrous period in coalition government didn’t dim the enthusiasm of the mung bean eating and sandal wearing faithful. Inexplicably, they stayed true.

I’d imagine that a lot of them, especially women, may have reconsidered their loyalty to the party when the party showed no loyalty to them, as evidenced on Tuesday. Because Lib Dem leader Mister Ed claimed, in response to a caller on an LBC phone-in asking him ‘on behalf of 51 per cent of the population’ to explain ‘what is a woman’. Sir Ed told the caller: ‘The vast majority of people whose biological sex is a woman when they were [born], they feel they’re women… But there’s this very small number of people who don’t feel like that.’ Presenter Nick Ferrari then asked twice: ‘Can a woman have a penis?’ Eventually, the Lib Dem leader replied: ‘Well, quite clearly.’

Any politician today is aware that this question might be asked of them, and equally aware of the political storm that engulfed Labour leader Not Hardie when he failed to answer a simple question about what was a woman, and equally aware that the Conservatives can answer this question with ease. Namely, that a woman is a biological human female. Mr Ed clearly saw a political opportunity here. One that would not only massively distance the Lib Dems from both the Labour and Conservative parties but equally demonstrate that the Liberal Democrats were fully onboard with the new political virtue signally orthodoxy, one that suggests among other things that a woman can have a penis.

Which, and I can’t quite believe this is even a thing that needs to written, is a load of what women don’t have.