I’M NOT A fan of bloodsports but I did enjoy watching the battering that Nick Clegg took from Nigel Farage on British television this week in their debate on the merits and demerits of staying in the EU. Clegg was not just outclassed in performance but was also reduced to a lump of bloody meat in the process. It was like watching a shark going for a naked swimmer in a glass tank.
At the beginning Clegg thought he’d biffed sharky Farage on the nose by levelling the Putin accusation at him: “You beast, you said you admired Putin and he’s responsible for Assad in Syria and children are dying,” he wailed. But Farage was having none of it.”The British people are sick of being dragged into foreign wars, you little numpty,” he replied (sort of), and everyone agreed. And Cleggy started bleeding into the water.
As we know sharks get hungrier at the scent of blood and realising this Clegg took to flailing as well as bleeding. The more he flailed hysterically the more blood he pumped out. The more he bled the more he became hysterical and the more he flailed. The blood and the flailing just excited the shark even more.
Clegg was no doubt advised by his team to play the emotion card, to counteract the rather dry approach he used in the previous encounter with Farage. Luckily, this was the worst bit of advice anyone has given a useless politician. If you like televised political blood sports, on the other hand, then it was the best advice.
Farage kept his cool while Clegg stamped his foot and thcweamed and thcweamed like Violet Elizabeth Bott. Or splashed around like a swimmer being chewed by a shark. I don’t know which image to go with, since both seem appropriate. Maybe Violet Elizabeth Bott being chomped by a shark in a glass tank. Naked. How about that?
It doesn’t really matter, because Clegg didn’t come up with one single good reason for Britain staying in the EU. Instead he blathered and lied while the shark calmly took one chunk out of him after another.
“Tell them Farage says the EU wants its own army,” his overpaid advisors must have told him, “that’ll make everyone laugh, especially if you mention Elvis.” This he dutifully did, forgetting that the plans for an EU military are outlined in the Lisbon Treaty.
And that the “European navy “ (EUNAVFOR) is busy in the Indian Ocean chasing Somali pirates at this very moment. And that the EU has various military “missions” going on all over Africa and the Middle East.
Not to mention that each member state is bound by the Lisbon Treaty to come to the aid of any other member state if attacked by an external power. Sounds familiar, that little set-up, doesn’t it? Worked out well in 1914, or so I read.
Clegg claimed that the percentage of legislation passed by the British parliament that came from the EU was a mere 7%. “Primary legislation” he actually said, knowing this doesn’t cover directives and regulations. In coming up with this porker he also ignored the words of one of his bosses in Brussels, commissioner (unelected) Viviane Reding, who just weeks before had been in London to lecture us on how ignorant we were about the EU and boasting about the fact that 70 per cent. of our laws were “co-authored” in Brussels. I think Viviane may intend to give him some corrective treatment next time he’s visiting the Berlaymont.
Then he kept going on about Farage being “dangerous” and delusional. Dangerous to an unattended pint, yes, and to a packet of Rothmans, but hardly to the welfare of Britain. Sharky Farage, he repeated, wanted to take us back not to the 1950s, that favourite era for progressive contempt, but the nineteenth. Precisely the time when Britain was at its economic and industrial zenith. When, presumably, it wasn’t part of any European project, because it stood alone and “isolated”.
But by this stage Nice Nick had fully morphed into a screamy Elizabeth-Bott-naked-swimmer-being torn-to-bits-by-a-shark character that nobody could take seriously any longer.
Except for the highly-informed members of our media, of course, who all (again) gave him the thumbs up as the winner of the debate. The British public, one of them opined the following day, had been swayed more by Farage’s bland emotional enticements than Clegg’s hard facts, which is why they voted for the shark. We’re too thick to understand, in other words, echoing Viviane. Now we know whose side the media are on.
Clegg ought to fire his aids for coming up with the whole strategy, lies, prevarications and all. Especially the lame jokes. “Billy no-mates,” he’d quipped about the UK under Ukip, “Billy no-jobs.” In the end it was him looking like he’d soon have no job.
