The Unexpected is so cool…

The three-way leadership debate (I haven’t dared to look and see whether that generated any slash fiction… oh my…) turned up a bit of a startler: Nick Clegg is generally thought to have kicked ass. Or rather, arse. The Sky Election Tracker has a measurable bump, but a new YouGov poll actually puts Labour in third place behind the Lib Dems. Who’da thunk it?

This is really interesting stuff – if you care about the election at all – because the Lib Dems have always had a problem with actualising (horrible word) their support. Lots of people like them but think of them as a non-vote. To have them placed seriously in the running could change that, and then we’d have a ballgame. (Mrs Harkaway is beside me saying “I’m not sure that is as interesting as you seem to believe” – her favourite TGAW quote for deflating husbands – but on this occasion it really is. If – and it’s a big if – this becomes a permanent acceptance of Nick Clegg &co, it marks a change in seven decades of British politics. Because we’re in the UK and not in Russia we’re not going to see Clegg sitting on a tank like Boris Yeltsin, but the upheaval in terms of constitutional change, bearing in mind that the Lib Dems are heavily into Proportional Representation and so on – will be pretty remarkable.)

The other thing the Lib Dems like is Europe, and that’s what David Cameron seems to be thinking is a weak spot. I can’t shake the feeling that it is a weak spot, but that it may be his weak spot. His line-up of of Europhobes would be delighted to see him take the knife to Clegg on this topic and indulge in some dog-whistle stuff on immigration. But the party which really needs to avoid talking about Europe is the Conservatives, whose fracture lines on the subject are old and deep. Then, too, while we whinge and complain about Europe in the UK, no one seriously imagines we’re going to do without trade alliances and so on, so the alternative is the US (unless we declare ourselves part of the Bric, if they’ll have us, which might not be such a bad idea – Cubritannia, anyone?). The Special Relationship has never been nearly as special as it was supposed to be, starting with the US refusal to fulfil its pledges on the nuclear bomb to the UK after the Second World War and going forward from there. Most recently, of course, the sub-prime mortgage thing was a bit awkward, like bringing Austrian wine to a dinner party in 1985.

And yes, there’s the Nuclear thing. The Lib Dems will scrap Trident. I hate Trident, but even I find that a little scary. What if we get invaded? But seriously, if we get invaded and our best option is submarine-based strategic nuclear weapons, we’re in bigger trouble than even nukes can solve. Trident is expensive, too – brain-bendingly expensive. We could give our soldiers actual body armour instead. Plus, we’ll still be nuclear, we just won’t have a missile system. Does that make us less scary? Not really, no. A nuclear state is a nuclear state. Delivery is an issue for military planners, but the point in political terms is made: under the right circumstances, we can turn your farm belt into glass. And in this world, where it’s hard to see what we’d be nuking – a cave system in Afghanistan? – I can see equipping the infantry as a vote-winner, with Trident as an expensive boondoggle.

So – on to the next debate, and into an interesting time.

And – heh – I just used the word ‘boondoggle’, which I have always wanted to do.