Hatred could be the making of Nick Clegg. It's humiliation the Lib Dem leader really should fear
He can no longer cycle to work. His image is burnt in effigy. Dog mess is pushed through his letter-box. His family may have to move home for their own safety. Nick Clegg is surely, as a conservative commentator wrote recently, "the most hated man" in Britain: the same writer compared the deputy prime minister's position to that of Norman Tebbit during the 1980s.
Which provokes a question: what harm did being hated do to Tebbit, the Conservative party chairman at the time of its hat-trick election victory in 1987? He seemed to thrive on hatred, much as deadly nightshade is said to love shade. Indeed, what damage did it do to Margaret Thatcher, three times a winner?
Sure, Clegg's circumstances are different: he's performed the mother of all U-turns on student finance, while Thatcher and Tebbit went on and on and on in a more or less straight line, proclaiming there was no alternative. All the same, there's a lesson. Hate suggests regard and respect, however grudging. Many Liberal Democrats believe Clegg made the wrong choice last May: nonetheless, nearly all signed up to it. They thus have no real answer to what he's surely telling dissidents in private: "Look, maybe we shouldn't be here. But we are here. The worst course now is to back down and look weak." This is Clegg as Macbeth: "I am in blood / Stepp'd in so far, that, should I wade no more, / Returning were as tedious as go o'er."
The urge to go all Schwarzenegger can be the ruin of politicians. The compulsion to seem strong played its part in driving Tony Blair to prosecute the Iraq war. But Clegg's insight is essentially correct. He can survive, even prosper, if he's viewed as Nasty Nick. It won't destroy his reputation. Indeed, whatever doesn't kill him will make him stronger. But what will finish him off, with a stake through his heart, is if he comes to be seen as ridiculous – as Calamity Clegg, to borrow the label that the rival Chris Huhne leadership campaign once sought to pin on him.
Ridicule, after all, implies not regard but contempt, scorn, mockery. It diminished a former Liberal leader, David Steel: in real life, a competent, determined politician; in caricature, a pathetic Spitting Image puppet bullied by a bigger one, David Owen. And it now threatens to destroy Clegg. His party may split not just three, but four ways in Thursday's student finance vote (by threatening to resign from government). In British politics, the trade union motto applies to all parties: unity is strength. Division and discord are weakness, which in turn spurs ridicule.
Clegg can survive humiliation on Thursday. The government won't collapse if it's beaten. The coalition will take stock and move on. But an image of hesitancy, muddle and chaos will linger, eating away at Clegg's party leadership. If the Conservatives or Labour win outright next time, the Lib Dem leader is finished – he will be the man who gave his party the power to destroy itself. If there's a Labour-Lib Dem coalition, Clegg surely won't be able to linger as deputy prime minister, obliged to declare that the old government he helped lead was largely wrong and the new one is entirely right. And if this Conservative-Lib Dem coalition is re-formed, Clegg will continue to travel evenly towards his journey's logical endpoint – absorption into the Tories.
David Cameron's project – to prolong his premiership, isolate his right, and reinvent the Macmillan Toryism of the 1950s, would then be almost complete. So although Clegg's problems are bad for Cameron in the short term, in the long term it ain't necessarily so. The prime minister must feel about Liberal Democrat division as St Augustine did about chastity: he wants it, but not yet.