The old jokes are the best because there's a grain of truth in them. So let us hear one more time the one about the guy who phoned the Liberal Democrats just after they went into coalition with the Tories.
"I'd like a copy of your manifesto," he says to the receptionist.
"I am very terribly, sir, but we've sold out."
"Everyone knows that!" the guy bellows. "But I would still like a copy of your manifesto!"
As you must have noticed, selling out means shutting up. An occasionally shrill but always pertinent voice has vanished from "our national conversation". As the broken manifesto promises remind us, whenever New Labour or the old Conservatives went along with the security establishment and proposed an attack on basic freedoms, the Liberal Democrats would explode.
You did not have to agree with them to be glad they were there. You might have thought that the police needed new powers to combat terrorism. You might have thought that the Liberals were gibbering paranoids. But you still ought to have been grateful that one major party obliged the authorities to justify themselves. The Liberal Democrats could say with pride that they kept the state honest.
And now they don't. Liberal Democrat ministers do little or nothing as scandals break about secret courts, the snoopers' charter and the detention of the partners of journalists under the Terrorism Act. They are so shameless that Nick Clegg's aides boasted to the Financial Times that the deputy prime minister had personally approved plans to force our sister paper, the Guardian, to destroy a hard disk containing Ed Snowden's leaked secrets on state surveillance. I remember a time, not so long ago, when the Lib Dems worried about the secret state. But that was another age.
Clegg's backbenchers are as malleable. Not one Liberal Democrat MP has sought to follow David Davis and become an unimpeachable defender of civil liberties. If you doubt me, ask who is the Lib Dem Davis? Tim Farron, Julian Huppert, Simon Hughes? No, I can't remember a word they have said either.
The few Liberal Democrats who stand by what their party believed the day before yesterday are patronised. A few weeks ago, for example, the Tories sent out vans carrying the message that illegal immigrants should "go home or face arrest". It was a transparent stunt by the Conservatives to increase their vote by whipping up anti-immigrant sentiment – and an unpatriotic stunt, too. Britain at its best is not a country that tolerates propaganda vans from our equivalent of the interior ministry touring the streets with threatening slogans. We don't do that kind of thing here, thank you very much.
Liberal Democrat MPs told Nick Clegg's office he must intervene. His aides could not have been more condescending. Clegg was the deputy prime minister and would not jeopardise his relationship with the Conservative party over such a trifle. The days passed, the protests grew and Clegg sensed political capital might be made. Without a word of apology to his MPs, he appeared on the BBC to condemn a Home Office he had excused a few days earlier.
People who know no other saying about politics know Lord Acton's warning that "power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men". Clegg puts the best gloss on the sentiment, but in his own clumsy way agrees with Acton. He told a contact of mine, once an ally, now a disdainful and disillusioned former friend, that it was all very well making promises in opposition, but he was in power now and power was hard work – bloody hard work, since you asked. If the protest voters, who had once supported him, didn't like it, that was tough. He lived in the real world.
The poor sap could not imagine what voters who had taken him at his word in opposition would think of him now. Senior Liberal Democrats tell me without a trace of self-consciousness or respect for the English language that they will "differentiate themselves from the Tory brand" by making a tactical decision to come out in favour of civil liberties as the next election approaches. It says much about the make-believe world they live in that they can still imagine that anyone will believe them.
It sounds as if power has corrupted them. But to repeat that cliche is to let the Lib Dems off too lightly. Nick Clegg is not a tyrannical monster – one of Lord Acton's great-bad men. Like so many Liberal Democrats, he isn't an alpha male but a beta male, a mediocre conformist, who is easily intimidated and pushed into line. Beta males are not silenced by the corruption of power but the paralysis power can bring.
Unless a politician knows what he wants to do, he (and it's nearly always a he with the Lib Dems) will be overwhelmed by office. The civil service will take over and follow its own agenda. In the case of civil liberties, bureaucratic rule means the security establishment imposing ever more authoritarian measures. It takes bloody-minded men and women to slap the permanent government down. But Lib Dems see themselves as nice and reasonable centrists who believe in consensual politics. They have not been brought up to fight.
David Davis has studied his former partners closely and concluded that the Lib Dems are as easy to manipulate as rubber bands. Half the parliamentary party has ministerial jobs – no party has ever had such a high proportion of MPs in office. They must keep quiet or quit. The other half wants to replace them. They wait for ministers to die, retire through ill health or resign because of a sex scandal (and, as we have seen, so many Lib Dem men live in the beta-male world of suburban swinger parties and rent boys, scandals are all but guaranteed). Like many of their Labour and Conservative colleagues, they are too young for power.
Despite Iraq, they remain in awe of the intelligence services and willing to submit to the spies' demands. The post-Second World War generation of politicians had served in the forces. As incompetent spies sent their comrades to their deaths, they learned the hard way the truth of the saying that "military intelligence" is an oxymoron. Today's politicians were brought up on James Bond and Spooks, says Davis, and, by God, it shows.
I could go on, but all the explanations in the world do not explain away the sadness of the moment. The Liberal party is dead and gone and I do not see a replacement in sight.
