If Nick Clegg’s LibDems do as well as expected on May 6th, their Leader will face a choice between appetite and principle. The editor assesses which he way he might go.

It behoves everyone (even The Slog) to admit it when they get something wrong. I got the dramatic effect of the televised debates utterly and completely wrong. And although Labour is calling the Election ‘wide open’ purely to rattle the Tories, they’re right – it is now anyone’s game. After weeks of arguing the ins and outs of poll methodologies and marginal constituencies, everyone’s assumptions -including mine – have been blown out of the water. I thought this would be the most boring election of my life; it’s shaping up now to be the most interesting.

The question that still remains for me is exactly how and why this has happened. I watched the first quarter of an hour, and the last ten minutes, of the first debate. Later – after all the hoo-haa – I watched the middle bit. I didn’t feel I was watching a world-changing event. I didn’t feel inspired. I thought of the same words that always occur to me when I watch politicians in action: loudhailer, wriggly, evasive, liar, superficial, soundbite, media-trained, false, formulaic, possibly mad. I didn’t think any of them did that well; but I suppose I saw Clegg as the most natural performer.

The key to this whole surge thing lies in the last word – performer. It was a performance by Clegg – and what a performance we’ve witnessed since. But that’s all it was: second-rate talent competition television, in which (as usual) not much real talent was discernible. Three wannabe singers, of whom one was awful, one was nervous, and Clegg managed to get to the end without forgetting any of the words.

If you’ve watched X-Factor and Britain’s Got Talent, then you’ll know what I mean: even the vaguest glimmer of talent is subjected to wild applause, and off-key singing earns the gentle rebuke “Ah think yer need ter do some work on the vocals, love”. And like the TV talent shows displaying little talent, the debates are being judged by an untutored audience which, on the whole, wouldn’t know talent if it tapped them on the nose with a small golden hammer and said “Good morning, my name’s Talent”.

Put before a man who has his feet on the ground and a brain moving faster than the sound of political woffle, Clegg was made to look trite and confused just two days before his emergence as Young Winston. His encounter with Paxman resembled Muhammed Ali fighting Christiano Ronaldo: you just know the pretty boy is going to look badly knocked about by the end of the contest.

The day before the debates, The Slog wrote a piece asking where PR had gone in the LibDem Manifesto. After being bombarded by LibDems shouting ‘foul!’, I did an audit of STV’s decline in stature, which made the back-pedalling look even more obvious. None of the Nationals have run with this, although one or two acute journalists have reached the same conclusion as me: this is the LibDems tarting up their house prior to a sale.

In the six weeks prior to this, the second week of the Election, Nick Clegg had behaved like the lovechild of Bill Sykes and Nancy: one minute the brutal, bludgeoning one-liners, next minute playing hard to get, the next asking how much money the client’s got on him. By turns, we were told, “I’m not taking any Cabinet seats, I might co-operate, Labour is a rotting carcass, I want to be Prime Minister, I’ll do a deal with anyone, Vince should be Chancellor, We’d have to have Cabinet seats, and Labour have got a policy with the words ‘alternative vote’ in it so that sounds good”.

Various writers over the weekend wrote excellent pieces pointing out that, in a nutshell, the Liberal Democrat leader is the antithesis of what most people want: Big social State, pro-EU (he’s a former Eurocrat himself), academic, official-cum-politician. And the Conservatives -as you’d expect – point out that a vote for Nick is a vote to keep the rotting carcass pulling the carriage.

For myself, as a lifelong (until recent years) Liberal voter, I see Nick Clegg as a cuckoo in the nest. He doesn’t display any of the values I associate with libertarianism – and his Treasury spokeman (while I respect the man as competent and honest) is a social democrat, pure and simple.

But the thinking cognoscenti know all this already. And we are very clearly not in the majority here – which brings me to an issue that usually gets me accused of being a Nazi. While this is a now battered hobby-horse of mine, it will bear bringing out of the cupboard one more time: trusting a thick, distracted, morally diluted and uninformed electorate with universal suffrage is the outside-lane to elective dictatorship. This isn’t an original thought of mine: Plato had it three thousand years ago. He was right then, and he is right today. It isn’t an insight, it’s foresight – based on commonsense and experience.

The choice facing Mr Clegg is very simple: he can either take advantage of a dumbed-down electorate, accept Labour’s hopelessly unfair AV voting system – and go down in history as the grubby politician who paved the way for the all-seeing totalitarian state. Or he can stick to his principles, hold out for STV – and at long last, break the mould of British politics.

Let’s wait and see what he does.