Clegg has lost the Gina Ford vote

Nick Thomas
On Thursday of last week, through the sort of comfortable, unspoken consensus enjoyed by amicably married couples, my wife and I passed on The Great Debate – ie the one about whether we should finally get the television working in order to watch three politicians trying to win our hearts and minds with carefully memorised sound-bites.
After four weeks in our new home we have cleared most of the boxes and can now see the set, with its cables still taped to its frame for ease of transportation, and perhaps we take a malicious pleasure in the sight of our electronic would-be master so humbled, as bound and mute as the voters in that Granada studio. We do watch it, in a way. We enjoy watching it suffer the pain of impotence. But also, the two-year-old and the baby were blissfully asleep, and we were relishing the peace. We caught some highlights on the radio, though, which didn’t make us regret missing the live broadcast. Since this election campaign effectively began the day Gordon Brown took office it is no surprise that he and David Cameron should be a bit tired, but the excerpt that sticks in the memory elicited a whoop and a groan and a weary shrug: Brown ending an allotment of air-time by saying: “This is something David Cameron will have to address”, thereby conceding defeat and offering his opponent an open goal – which the latter failed to notice, merely trotting out Platitudes 39, 106b and 87 (sub-section g) in response.
The really surprising thing is that the aftermath of this historic British media event, following a precedent the Yanks set 50 years ago, has given the victory to Nick Clegg, who ought to be Peter Sallis’s grandson in Last of the Summer Wine but is actually the latest leader of the Lib Dems, and a power in the land, even though most people would guess that he’s a retired member of a minor pop group if shown his photograph. Maybe he was truly brilliant on camera, and we missed a treat. More likely is that the British public has evinced its oldest consistent trait in backing the underdog until it matters, but it is also probably true that, while Brown and Cameron were being pathologically careful, Clegg let loose a bit because he has everything to play for, and so impressed the viewers with his cavalier verve. The fact that both Brown and Cameron seem to have panicked at his bounce, and turned their fire on him, does not impress me. If they’re confident in their own policies and traditions they should smile patronisingly through the mayfly day of the upstart, and gloat at its end.
Clegg doesn’t impress me, either, though. He has referred to Labour and the Conservatives as “the old parties”, which is clearly not ignorance on his part about the antiquity of the Liberal Party, but rather an exploitation of public ignorance which is impossible to admire. His profession of the lack of faith – even though his children are being brought up as Catholics by their Spanish mother – I acknowledge for its honesty, while lamenting it. But he really got on my wrong side by criticising the child-care guru Gina Ford in public print. This is not because he’s wrong. I think he’s wrong, not least because the Ford method, which is really just about gentle routine, is the reason we even had the option of watching television at 8.30pm, and we’re fans, but Ms Ford herself writes that her regime is not for everybody, and recommends the application of commonsensical flexibility. Each to their own. No, it’s the sheer stupidity of alienating about two million Gina Ford-admiring voters, when the man has a plausible chance of dominating a hung Parliament, that offends the political animal in me. Critics of the Ford method tend to have an innate antipathy to anything that smacks of order and discipline; but most of these people are Lib Dems already, and Clegg should have kept his mouth shut on the subject if he wished to woo all those floating voters who have chosen to raise their children in a way he happens to find irritating.
All politicians are just attention-seeking toddlers at heart. Maybe Gina Ford’s next book should be about how to manage them.