Candide Nick Clegg looks on the bright side in LBC interview

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/jun/25/nick-clegg-looks-bright-side-lbc-interview

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Plucky, the Liberal Democrat battle bus, hasn’t been seen since it was driven off a cliff near John O’Groats on the last day of the general election campaign. After six weeks in intensive care, Plucky’s driver took his first tentative steps towards recovery by giving his first interview to Nick Ferrari on LBC radio.

The rehab is far from complete: looking at the LBC website, while it was reassuring to see Nick Clegg up and about – he does human rather better than most politicians – his smile is still nervous and forced, while his memory loss remains almost total. Post-traumatic election disorder is a much more serious condition than many imagine.

Clegg remembered almost nothing. Listening to him speak, it was as if he had been happily driving Plucky down a lane to Somewhere-Not-Very-Much when he had been blinded by a burst of sunlight and had wound up down a total dead end. It could have happened to anyone. It had happened to anyone. David Cameron and Ed Miliband had been dazzled by exactly the same sunburst and had also ended up in totally different locations to the one they expected. “So what was the first thing you did when you realised you were in a bad pile-up?” Ferrari asked. “I had a cigarette,” said Clegg, rather shamefacedly.

Ferrari normally specialises in the pugnacious and adversarial: this time, though, in acknowledgement of the fragility of his guest, he tried the role of psychotherapist. How did Nick feel? Did he have a lot of unresolved anger issues? Ferrari trying to do empathy was almost as unsettling as listening to Clegg on the couch. It felt somehow raw and intrusive. Like any good shrink, Ferrari’s immediate concern was for the wellbeing of his patient. “Have you stopped smoking?” he asked.

“Oh yes,” said Clegg, rather too quickly

“When?”

“Oh I don’t know. A few days after …” Clegg interrupted himself by hacking out a chesty cough.

“It doesn’t sound like it,” said Ferrari, sceptically.

“That? The cough is just something I picked up while swimming in a river in France.”

Of course! The famous French river swimming cough.

Sensing his patient was in even greater denial than anyone had thought possible, Ferrari chose to move on. Did Nick have any regrets about his five years in coalition?

“None whatsoever,” Clegg chirped back. “I’m very proud of everything we did.” In PluckyWorld, the coalition had been an unmitigated triumph.

Ferrari’s eyes moistened with sadness. Clegg was going to need a great many more sessions to come to terms with reality, so it was probably best not to mention either tuition fees or the fact that Clegg had looked utterly miserable throughout the last year of the parliament squeezed between Cameron and George Osborne on the front bench.

“What you’ve got to remember,” Clegg breezed on, “is that we have a totally unfair electoral system. Under proportional representation we would have got 51 seats.” True enough, so why had he blocked the first, halting stages towards electoral reform?

That was another question Ferrari deemed too painful to be dealt with during a first session. Instead, he moved on to some easier questions.

How did he feel about Vince Cable and Tim Farron?

They were his best friends ever.

How excited was he to be still an MP for Sheffield Hallam?

Nobody could possibly be more excited.

Is black white?

Yes.

Eventually drawing the 50 minutes – what therapists call an hour – to a close, Ferrari asked for the £50 he had bet with Clegg before the election that the former Lib Dem leader wouldn’t be deputy prime minister after it.

“Let’s have another bet,” Clegg suggested. “£50 says I will be the next deputy leader of the Lib Dems.”

It was like taking candy from a baby. Plucky was about to head over a cliff for a second time. Everything was for the best in the best of all possible worlds. Ferrari had just created a new TV format: Candide Camera.