Growing up in 1970s working-class Bristol (before it went all poke: posh and woke) life was so tribal that you could get beaten up at school as a general election approached if it somehow emerged that your parents wouldn’t be voting Labour. (Our local MP for Bristol South-East was the dashing young Tony Benn, so you can see why we got a bit carried away.)

Even more remarkable, you could be given a dry slap solely for not knowing who the correct candidate was during a council election; I’ll never forget a fearsome few weeks when a gang of boys went around the playground getting hold of other boys and hissing at them ‘Sam or Doctor? Sam or Doctor?’ If you said ‘Sam’ you were OK: he was the Labour candidate. But if you chose the mysterious ‘Doctor’ – the Conservative hopeful – you could expect to go home wearing the contents of your mid-morning milk on your blazer.

I was a mutinous little madam from a very young age, and at some point it occurred to me that I could rebel (but not to the extent of becoming a Tory, and thus committing social suicide at ballet – my neighbourhood was so hardcore Labour that even the adolescent ballerinas were Bennites) by throwing in my teenage allegiance with a third party – at that time, the Liberals. As luck would have it, their leader then was Jeremy Thorpe, very much the sinister and cadaverous type I went for after a pubescence spent panting after Christopher Lee as Dracula.

I felt confusion watching Thorpe speak – he sounded so kind, yet looked so cruel – but dismissed this as a paradox of sex appeal, which he certainly had, having outraged his classmates at Eton by announcing that he planned to marry Princess Margaret, at that time second in line to the throne. It wasn’t until I read Jamaica Inn and shared Mary Yellan’s horror on discovering exactly how the vicar saw his flock that I was able to make sense of the strange situation. When all the awful stuff about Thorpe came out as my teenage years drew to a close, I felt I had learned quite a lesson about politicians who present as virtuous; give me an outright bounder any day.

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Brendan O’Neill

The delusion of the Houthi pacifists

This has very much shaped my adult view of the third party in British politics, whether they call themselves Liberals, Social Democrats or, since 1988, Lib Dems. They talk an awful lot about being nice – it’s their raison d’etre – and position themselves against the nasty people in the big parties. But I’ve noticed in recent years that the more someone claims to be an empath, the likelier they are to be a narcissist: it’s gaslighting 101. The Lib Dems are the party political personification of this. The point about the third party isn’t that they’re too nice, too moderate, too Derek Smalls; it’s that they’re such wrong ‘uns that neither Labour or the Tories – who harbour many wrong ‘uns in their ranks – want to be in the same room as them. But they persist in seeing themselves as Davids (two Davids leading them, at one point) taking on monstrous hordes of Goliaths – they are, as Rod Liddle summed it up here, ‘specialists in self-delusion’.

It wasn’t enough to have disgraced themselves by appointing a man once accused of having commissioned a murder as their leader. Or a man who literally drank himself to death as another (senior Lib Dems knew about Charles Kennedy’s alcoholism when he was elected leader in 1999 and, incredibly, believed that it could be hidden from the public). Or that Kennedy’s successor Menzies Campbell claimed expenses of £10,000 to have his London home refurbished. Or that Cyril Smith, the most popular MP in their party for a long time, was a man who could have given Jimmy Savile a run for his money.

Nick Clegg, former Lib Dem leader, now ‘president of global affairs for Meta’ (Credit: Getty Images)

With that patrician callousness typical of these self-proclaimed champions of the little man against the Establishment, the press office of the then leader of the Liberals, David Steel, said of Cyril Smith’s crimes:

‘All he seems to have done is spanked a few bare bottoms’.

After his death, it transpired that there had been 144 complaints of sexual assault against Smith – his youngest victim being a boy of eight – and that the police and Rochdale council had failed to act; of course the party knew about it.

The cherry on the top of this layer cake of shamelessness came when Nick Clegg jumped into bed with one of the most financially draconian Tory governments of all time before flouncing off to Silicon Valley to earn millions of pounds a year as ‘president of global affairs’ at Meta.

In the two main parties, for all their faults, these charlatans would have been picked off – for their own good and that of others – along the way. But in the party of the oddball, the gurning freak is king: which brings us to ‘Sir’ Ed Davey.

Davey is foul; with a face like a Cornish pasty without any filling, his political career is a litany of making light of the worries and cares of the ordinary voter. Supremely contemptuous of the concerns of women by being utterly committed to favouring the ‘rights’ of transvestites, he is against Brexit, in favour of green policies which would see the working class shivering by candlelight in 15-minute ghettos – and, it transpires, seemingly utterly unconcerned with the plight of the sub-postmasters who suffered bankruptcy, imprisonment (in one case, of a pregnant woman) broken marriages, ruined health and suicide because of the way they were persecuted on his watch during his time as post office minister. Davey may be telling the truth when he says he was lied to by the Post Office just like everyone else, but he’s certainly guilty of being deplorably incurious; he initially refused a meeting with Alan Bates because he was happy to just blindly take the PO at their word, when a genuinely decent (or indeed competent) politician would at least have given him a hearing.

It’s been said that all political careers end in failure; the Lib Dems start and end and spend the bit in between in failure

In a crowded field, the hypocrisy of Davey is in a class of its own. Over the past five years, he has called for the resignation of public figures a whopping 34 times – yet shows no sign of resigning or even giving back his honour, as the wretched Paula Vennells has had the grace to. Davey seems intensely relaxed about his own incompetence, appearing to believe that the world owes him a lush living; as the bankrupted sub-postmaster Jo Hamilton said to the Times:

‘Of course Davey should have been asking more questions. What did he think – we were just moaning? They’re called public servants but they do anything but serve the public.’

It’s interesting the people who Davey considers talking to and not talking to; at the 2009 Lib-Dem conference he called for a dialogue with the actual Taliban – or, as he put it, ‘time for tea with the Taliban’. What a shame he had no time for tea with suicidal sub-postmasters.

I don’t recall a time when there has been greater contempt for politicians, but the public seem reluctant to deal the final, deciding blow to both Sunak and Starmer, sensing somehow that they mean well, despite their bungling. With Davey there is no such sense of decency; he can do a good resting concerned face, but paradoxically, when he smiles, you see the real Ed Davey: once again, another apparently kindly centrist who reveals what he thinks of his flock when that wolverine grin appears. He is a wolf in shepherd’s clothing; he oddly reminds me of Thorpe, but minus the sex appeal, the homosexuality and the homicidal tendencies. His passionate, almost parasexual attachment to his knighthood – like Starmer’s – is enough alone to make him a laughing stock, even if he hadn’t stated last year that women can ‘quite clearly’ have a penis. (The TERF line about politicians ‘If they’ll lie about what a woman is, they’ll lie about anything’ came back irresistibly to me here.) I recall how delighted Tony Benn was when he became the first peer to successfully renounce his title and thus be able to stand for election; it’s an indicator of the meretriciousness of modern politics that the likes of Davey and Starmer grab at them while daring to bait the Tories for being steeped in privilege. I’ve seen knights on a chessboard with more emotional depth and moral substance than Davey.

It’s been said that all political careers end in failure; the Liberals/Lib Dems start and end and spend the bit in between in failure, partly due to the awful leaders they elect. The third party has been told by its leaders to go and prepare for government more times than Elton John has retired – and, under Davey, they are on the verge of becoming as ludicrous.

This arrogant, shameless, useless excuse for a politician must be replaced by his party if, once again, they are not to be packed off back into the wilderness for another decade – with the rise of Reform and the new Corbyn party no longer able to be written off as they might have been before disaffection with mainstream politics became such a thing. This time their sojourn might well see the Lib-Dems eaten alive by the unashamed wolves to the right and the left of them, while they posture and preen inside their sheep’s clothing, which now  – thanks to ‘Sir’ Ed Davey – seems very much like a shroud.<//>