Of course it doesn’t always work out: One might have thought Tony Blair would make decisions in government by careful marshalling of the evidence and arguments, combined with a deep concern for a fair, open society; because that’s the way he pitched himself to the voters. Hmmm… maybe not so much.

And I’m not so sure some issues aren’t just a little bit important in themselves for many people. If you’re on the wrong side of the debates about climate change or torture then you can have the most lovely personality in the world but I’m unlikely to want to vote for you.

There’s also the Reputation Effect. I haven’t got a clue what the best plan is for sorting out the economy. Vince has a great reputation not, I suspect, because of his calm sensible way of putting his case (although that undoubtedly helps) but because those knowledgeable people who have got stuck into the detail, who’ve listened and engaged with a range of opinions, those people say he knows what he’s talking about. His plan for the economy is worth buying not because what it says on page 12, paragraph 3, line 6 should be done however events or forecasts turn out, but because his reputation is that he has been right on so many issues in the past. And the opposite is true for some other politicians.

Yes, and just think how much happier we’d all be now! Bugger Downing Street; it’s time to support Nick Clegg for Pope.

Ideology/realism, personality/policy etc creates good politics when the links between the two are clear, well-rounded and well understood. The balance is the thing, and knowing that and how it will swing under certain conditions is vital in making a judgement about the appropriate and proportionate level of a correct response.

It is not about whether they are correct, but whether we offer support or opposition to others course of action as the best means of getting a positive solution.

Tony Benn was and still is a polemicist – he was unsuited to government and should have locked himself away in academia, but his personal guilt and insecurity about his own identity spurred him to provide a continual public self-justification of his choice to annihilate his aristocratic background that meant he could never step back and gradually became too extreme for sense.

“If God was a LibDem he would have given us the ten suggestions”

Genius!

Sure, you can see why the sort of Trots dressed up in Islamic togs who seem to have replaced the common or garden Trots in universities these days might be keen on that line. But why do we also hear it so often from so many people who really ought to know better?

Why is it that Blair’s sense of what is morally right, however much he messed up because he was too thick to work out that toppling Saddam wouldn’t see democratic government rising up instantly in days, is considered something to huh-huh about, when essentially moralistic arguments are commonplace amongst us? Don’t we have a moral force telling us it’s bad that for the state to tell us what we should do in our private lives? Or that it’s bad for people in this country to go hungry or homeless of the like? Would any of us put so much time into politics if there wasn’t some moral force driving us? Or is it really what they say, we are all in it just for what we can get out of it?

Doesn’t this indicate the problem? If the best that can be said for Clegg is that he did well on the Gurkhas issue, that’s damning. It just reinforces the idea that the Liberal Democrats are some insignificant party which occasionally brings up small but important issues that the other ones have forgotten. I want the leader of our party to be known and respected in this country for his or her understanding of the major problems we are in, and clear view of how we are to get out of them. The Gurkhas are not one of these major problem, are they?

Look – what we are seeing now is all the shit that has been thrown since 1979 hitting the fan big time. The over-concentration on the elitist finance industry and the running down of other industries. The encouragement to take on over-large debts puffing up house prices to unsustainable levels with some sort of weird idea we can all get by selling houses to each other. Encouraging us to take private pensions and insurance sold to us by clueless salesmen whose only real knowledge is the commission they’ll get from the sale. Burning off the North Sea oil and gas to keep us going temporarily, while selling control of energy resources to overseas suppliers who see the UK as a place to make a quick buck rather than long-term strategic investment for the needs of the country. Spending billions on unusable weaponry to stop the Russians from marching in with snow on their boots, while leaving the back door open for them to march in, buy up our newspapers, make us dependent on them for gas supplies etc. Selling off council housing and not building more because “the market will provide” (yes – same houses, three times as much rent, paid to profiteer private landlords in housing benefit). Imposing rigid bureaucratic state control of school teaching under the supposition that schools competing in league tables ranked by box-ticking tests will “drive up quality”. Private Finance deals which are the rough equivalent of taking on a mortgage where you tie yourself down to using whatever gardeners, decorators, and other workmen the bank decides you should have for the duration of the mortgage. Contracting out cleaning and maintenance work in the NHS etc to the lowest bidder, which is roughly like sacking the gardener who knows and cares for your garden and bringing in the bloke who knocks on your door and tells you he’ll do it for a fiver. Creating a social and cultural atmosphere in which a dog-eat-dog attitude in which rising to the top by pushing down others is treated as the highest value, and then moaning about a “broken society”. Smashing up everything that used to bring us together and make us proud of our localities and our nation but doesn’t make a profit for a big businessman.

Look, I’m just throwing out a few ideas here. Is it really so difficult when the choice otherwise is a return to the party that gave us all of this and has apologised for none of it, or the party which made such an inept job of opposing it that it gave in and won power by accepting it and doing it to more extremes, to make a name for oneself politically on some more central issues than the Gurkhas?

http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/v1ch13s7.html

Policies are crafted for the moment. What matters is the direction you think the politician wants to move the world and how they will react to events – its about instincts.

Benn believes this because he is still wedded to the policies that failed when he tried to introduce them in the 1960s. And like most socialists he is too conservative to notice that the world has moved on.

Forgive me for not being able to recall the source but I’m sure I saw or heard numbers recently to the effect that Nick Clegg’s public recognition and rating has been steadily rising since the Gurkhas issue and is now quite good compared to the other leaders and past Lib Dem leaders.

I agree with you the grassroots Lib Dem attitudes to Nick Clegg is not unadulterated hero worship but the fact that it is not is arguably a healthy state of affairs?

I’m also very sceptical about Tony Benn’s much repeated claim that policies matter more than personality when the latter and, more specifically his rhetorical brilliance, played such an important a part in his own career.

Having blogged a bit about Jo Grimond and Paddy Ashdown (e.g. the link above), the big question I’m still wrestling with is how Nick Clegg’s personality is coming across. His low public recognition rating will no doubt improve during the election, but there are at least two things that I find worrying: (1) the fact that I’m still finding it difficult to reach any firm conclusion this far into his leadership and (2) recent quizzing of quite a lot of party members has so far produced nothing more positive than lukewarm support for his leadership – and, if that’s the loyalists’ view, what will the mass electorate be thinking?

I think the fact that she disagrees with Tony Benn is one of her most attractive features!

Actually, politics should be about ideology, too. My lament is that politicians have abandoned ideology and try to present themselves as the best managers of a machine that is never questioned. The philosophy is largely assumed to be given.