It’s been a good week for Nick Clegg. He managed to launch a vacuous, opportunistic Manifesto (full of rhetoric, and almost emptied of electoral reform) without anyone in the media noticing; and then emerge from a smartarsed performance in the TV debate as ‘the winner’. Truly, this is Instant Politics.

The thing that worries me is the obvious – that it’s also one step nearer to bread and circuses: the transfer of Cowellite superficiality and instant judgement from Britain’s Got Talent to Britain’s Got Nick. What Britain’s actually got is a whopping great cultural, economic and fiscal problem, and Nick Clegg – even with Vinny Livewire – has got no more idea how to solve it than David Cameron and Gordon Brown.

There is something disturbingly counterfeit about watching a bloke hitting lots of buttons simply by not being the other two: ‘Nick Clegg – guaranteed Brown & Cameron-free’. I saw The Worm score-cum-postmortem crossing the TV screen, and found myself intermittently laughing at the way it dived whenever Brown came on camera, and terrified as just the words from Cameron ‘cut immigration’ made it shoot through the top of the telly. This is a world become nothing but Right Now: churning out politicians tailor-made for electors who want everything Right Now. Right Now, we’ve found this squeaky-clean Clegg fellow, so he must be The Right One, right?

Wrong. Nick Clegg’s achievement last night was to sound clever, play the underdog outsider, and not fall over. On the basis of this amazing performance, his Prime Ministerial prospects shot up from 14% to 37%. But Nick Clegg is not going to be Prime Minister. He knows this, you know this, and I know this. He is going to have to do some sort of sleazy deal with the other two just to get a Cabinet seat: and as the Libdems have massively diluted their commitment to real proportional representation, the chances are (with help from Lord Adonis) he’s going to do that grubby backroom fix with a Labour Party he recently referred to as ‘a rotting carcass’.

The truly frightening thing about this last week in politics has been the rank performance of the media set, showing itself once more – apart from the expected brilliant exceptions – to be half-asleep and lacking in any detective skills. This is the same mob who were miles behind the music on Brown’s Chilcot lies, unwilling to see the inevitable demise of Greece, and unable even to grasp why every new entrant into the Buckingham election brings Bercow closer to the possibility of humiliating defeat. If an old semi-pro like me can regularly beat the nationals into second place, you have to know that something is terribly wrong in the way our national life is critiqued.

For the Conservatives in particular, the situation is critical. A Clegg/Brown stitch-up based on the bogus ‘representational’ nature of the Alternative Vote system would see them locked out of power for good. And with the likes of Balls, Mandelson, Miliband, Harman and Dromey left pulling the strings backstage, the UK could soon turn into every libertarian’s Rocky Horror Show.

Above all, between now and May 6th the Tories must nail the nation’s new hero Nick Clegg down on the issue of electoral reform: does he genuinely want a fairer system, or is he just another slimeball ready to neuter the Opposition for his own power-driven ends? This really shouldn’t be that hard to do: he dropped PR from the ‘price’ of cooperation during the Paxo interview, he is being openly courted by Lord Adonis, he has moved visible closer to New Labour, and PR has almost entirely disappeared from the Party manifesto.

The next week or so will tell us whether David Cameron has the good sense, good heart and bottle to do this. I hold no more of a brief for his Party than for the other runners in this nag’s handicap; but at the moment, he and his colleagues are the only thing lying in the way of deluded dictatorship…and almost certain disaster.