Pissing down your back and telling you it's raining, an occasional series

Nick Clegg tells us that the easy thing to do would have been to have kept his promise. That would be the easy and popular thing. But he had the courage and honesty to take the difficult choice and break his promise. And now he's being entirely open about the fact that he broke his promise. So in many ways, we should be impressed by his honesty. Legend.

Difficult, difficult, lemon difficult. This was rehearsed pretty much verbatim in the pivotal scene of "In the Loop", but it's a surprisingly old idea, the best example I can think of being the Borges short story "Three Versions of Judas". I suppose this is what they call postmodern politics. Interestingly, of course, Clegg justifies it all by reference to "political realities". Another political reality is that if you piss people off badly enough, you might find your windows don't last as long as the builders said they would. I hope that one doesn't become too salient.

(The thing about "only when we came into government did we find out how bad the finances were" is, of course, a lie, of the more-or-less-flat-out variety. Tax receipts have been consistently better than Darling's forecasts, not worse.)