Just as Rihanna found love in a hopeless place, the other day I found hope on LBC’s Nick Ferrari Show.

I expect few readers of The New World are fans of Ferrari, the owlish former tabloid hack who once hired, for Kelvin MacKenzie’s L!VE TV, a weatherman with dwarfism who required a trampoline to point at rain over the Highlands. His radio shtick as an equal-opportunities bruiser of politicians from both left and right sits awkwardly with his Daily Express column, where the bruising appears to travel in only one direction. Recent headlines include “Surrender Starmer may as well fly the white flag over Downing Street” and “Keir Starmer is such a disaster he has one thing in common with Saddam Hussein”.

Few readers will hold Nick Clegg in high regard either, though many will have voted for him in 2010. That was shortly before he went into coalition with the Cameroons, nodded through austerity, broke his promise on tuition fees and was kicked out of mainstream politics just in time to miss a Brexit referendum that he might, in more confident days, have swung for Remain. His punishment was to earn £100m at Meta, working for a man who makes the characters of Succession look like the Dalai Lama.

But on a visit to Ferrari’s show on Wednesday, January 28, Clegg reminded you why the Lib Dems picked up 23% of all votes in 2010, nearly double their 12.2% in 2024. The subject was 10 years of Brexit, and Clegg said something that was simple, emotive and daring in a way that no senior Labour figure has yet managed:

“I don’t blame people for voting for change – but even the most ardent Brexit voters would not deny all the evidence that is piling up… I think it’s perfectly reasonable to say, ‘listen, the victors of that Brexit referendum have had a decade to show the benefits of their handiwork. They have failed. We all know that. All the evidence shows that it’s making us poorer and weaker.”

“It’s a good time now to just pause and reflect. If we’ve lost one decade, are we going to lose another one and another one and another one just because we find it very difficult to look ourselves in the mirror and ask ourselves whether we took the right turn or not?”

This came just days after reports that Starmer plans to make Brexit the dividing line at the next election – attacking Farage as an ideologue, touting the value of incremental deals, promising to make things a bit less bad, one step at a time. It is cautious politics and bloodless rhetoric.

The danger of the step-by-step approach, as Clegg told Ferrari, is that “in studios like this there’s going to be a lot of heat and fury around a student exchange here, a defence cooperation there, an energy exchange system… it’s going to be lots and lots of mini-debates which duck the big thing.”

That big thing, he said, was for Starmer to be explicit that being right at the heart of Europe was his goal, and a goal to be achieved quickly. “We can’t afford to waste another 10 years,” Clegg said.

And probably for the first time in 16 wasted years, four little words came to mind: I agree with Nick.