Just as Rihanna found love in a hopeless place, the other day I found\u00a0hope\u00a0on LBC\u2019s\u00a0Nick Ferrari Show.<\/p>\n
I expect few readers of\u00a0The New World\u00a0are fans of Ferrari, the owlish former tabloid hack who once hired, for Kelvin MacKenzie\u2019s\u00a0L!VE TV, a weatherman with dwarfism who required a trampoline to point at rain over the Highlands.\u00a0His radio shtick as an equal-opportunities bruiser of politicians from both left and right sits awkwardly\u00a0with his\u00a0Daily Express\u00a0column, where the bruising appears to travel in only one direction. Recent headlines include \u201cSurrender Starmer may as well fly the white flag over Downing Street\u201d and \u201cKeir Starmer is such a disaster he has one thing in common with Saddam Hussein\u201d.<\/p>\n
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 \u00a3100m at Meta, working for a man who makes the characters of\u00a0Succession\u00a0look like the Dalai Lama.<\/p>\n
But on a visit to Ferrari\u2019s 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:<\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t blame people for voting for change \u2013 but even the most ardent Brexit voters would not deny all the evidence that is piling up\u2026 I think it\u2019s perfectly reasonable to say, \u2018listen, 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\u2019s making us poorer and weaker.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s a good time now to just pause and reflect. If we\u2019ve 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?\u201d<\/p>\n
This came just days after reports that Starmer plans to make Brexit the dividing line at the next election \u2013 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.<\/p>\n
The danger of the step-by-step approach, as Clegg told Ferrari, is that \u201cin studios like this there\u2019s going to be a lot of heat and fury around a student exchange here, a defence cooperation there, an energy exchange system\u2026 it\u2019s going to be lots and lots of mini-debates which duck the big thing.\u201d<\/p>\n
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. \u201cWe can\u2019t afford to waste another 10 years,\u201d Clegg said.<\/p>\n
And probably for the first time in 16 wasted years, four little words came to mind: I agree with Nick.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Just as Rihanna found love in a hopeless place, the other day I found\u00a0hope\u00a0on LBC\u2019s\u00a0Nick Ferrari Show. I…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":729191,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5226],"tags":[802,748,2000,299,5187,1699,4884,29141,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-729190","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-brexit","8":"tag-brexit","9":"tag-britain","10":"tag-eu","11":"tag-europe","12":"tag-european","13":"tag-european-union","14":"tag-great-britain","15":"tag-nick-clegg","16":"tag-uk","17":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115979983912271295","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/729190","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=729190"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/729190\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/729191"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=729190"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=729190"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=729190"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}