We’ve been here before I know, but bear with me. A fortnight ago, this column pointed out that since election talk began this year, Nick Clegg has been for, against, in and out of a coalition Cabinet. He has dropped PR from the Party manifesto, and talked of fair votes. He has given four bargaining chips to Paxman, none of which were PR. Then last week, he told us PR would be ‘a cast-iron’ demand.

Last Thursday night, Nick told the viewers on the leaders’ tv debates that it was not his job to decide who another Party’s leader should be. He would be quite happy, he said, to work with Gordon Brown. Then this is appeared in the Sunday Times this morning:

‘…he [Clegg] believes Brown is finished, saying it would be “defying the laws of gravity” for the prime minister to cling on, after presiding over the greatest recession in a generation.

“To now claim to offer something new and hopeful to the British public is incredible. I don’t think even a politician with much greater gifts than Gordon could have succeeded in airbrushing over that record,” he puffs.’

Round and round in circles/ goes the teddy bear/ this way and that way/and a tickly under there

What happened between Thursday and Saturday was that Gordon Brown slumped back to third position. This is the pattern for the Thoughts of Fairman Nick: whoever’s down in the polls, he kicks – whoever’s rising, he courts.

The last man to behave like this promised the minority Party a big role in Government. Then a landslide put that man into Number Ten, and he never mentioned such a role ever again. But the media said he’s easy with people and he has charisma. Let’s go with him, they said.

The man was Anthony Charles Lynton Blair.

The electorate is going to make the same mistake it made in 1997. Had they just decided not to vote, I would’ve been happier. But no: the man on the Clapham laptop is coming in, to the election booth after all – all starry-eyed, to support another fresh face who – on even the most cursory interrogation – doesn’t check out.

The electorate is incompetent. And in a libertarian democracy, that’s the beginning of the end.