Nick Clegg’s announcement this morning that he will make no accommodation with Labour while Gordon Brown remains leader is just the latest in this extraordinary confluence of radical scenarios which is the British election 2010.   The most immediate issue is: how, if this were in fact the post-election scenario, could Labour elect a new leader for the purposes of negotiations confined within 12 days after 6 May?   Presumably it would be said, faute de mieux, that the new PLP would be rapidly convened, allow one or two days for nominations, and then one or two days for the election, subject (which can hardly be omitted) to confirmation by Conference in September.   It seems highly doubtful whether Clegg would countenance this.   But how elese can it be done?

But there is a longer-term and deeper point here.   It’s not that the Lib Dems have suddenly struck gold in their popularity which for some reason was hidden for so long.   What really has happened is that the electorate is pig sick of the old politics characterised by two parties increasingly similar offering nothing fundamentally new, a culture of constant spin and manipulation, a Parliament increasingly divorced from the electorate within the hermetic bubble of Westminster, a centralisation of power both in and outside Parliament leading to a collapse of accountability throughout society, a massive financial collapse caused by the banks but where the leadership of both main political parties had paved the way by deregulatory policies of mammoth irresponsibility, and to cap it all the MPs’ expenses scandal which has heartily sickened public opinion about the whole political class.   And then along comes Nick Clegg and provides a vent for all these locked-up feelings of anger, despair, resentment, and antagonism sometimes almost verging on hatred.

The key point here is that whatever happens in the second and third leaders’ debate, whether or not Clegg manages to hold his own with expectations so high of him, the underlying driving force to sweep away the old order and inaugurate something genuinely new and real will still be there, explosive like an Icelandic volcano, till its ash has buried the old politics and carved a niche for a new beginning, painful and destructive though it may well be.

Irony upon irony, this has erupted through the ministrations of David Cameron who was recently described in the Telegraph by Simon Heffer (not exactly one of us) as displaying “disinterest in policy, obsession with style, flexibility in principle, and absence of policy”.   Heaping further ironies on the pyre, Clegg has succeeded precisely by out-Cameroning Cameron – a more novel, ephemeral epiphany of the tired, worn version whose initial fluency and charisma now comes across as shallow and insubstantial.   God certainly moves in mysterious ways, his wonders to perform.   But one way or another we are witnessing the unfolding birth pangs of a new political and economic order.

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