Pretty boy politics

Nick Clegg is a terrible party leader under whom the Liberal Democrats are going to go backwards when the election comes. To be fair, his job is hard: he has to say silly things to get a headline; he knows he can't actually win office; and discipline is very difficult to uphold because there is no money or goodies to give to his MPs. Additionally, he has Chris Huhne, an effective performer, snapping at his heels, Vince Cable, the real shadow chancellor, always on the telly and even, recently, on Desert Island Discs communing with middle Britain, and the ghost of Charlie Kennedy raising a glass in the background, ruddy elder statesman.

So, in sum, Clegg heads a prickly residue that acts more as a pressure group or a sounding board than a party, and no other party would be remotely interested in his ideas unless there were deals to be done by the holder of the most seats in a hung parliament. Unlikely at this point, though things will change to some degree, and remember that electorates punish the junior party in unpopular coalitions: check out the slump in the Liberal vote in 1979. One might almost say that the Lib Dems exist as a refuge for people too timid to support either of the other parties.

But Clegg this morning on Today says that the Lib Dems want to offer infant schools the chance to cut class sizes to 15. He admits that in these straitened times there will be no spare money and no prospect of raising taxes, so the funding will have to come from redirecting resources. His first target is the child trust fund, which gives teenagers £250 when they are 18. Yes, agreed - better to cut that than, for example, educational maintenance allowances - the £30 a week paid to sixth-formers in low-income homes and money that really does make a difference. The rationale for the scheme is laudable, too. No one would argue with the idea of giving much more time to disadvantaged children, with one-to-one tuition available. It is, however, the numbers of teachers required to pull such a class size off that is the worry - 30,000 and more. Plus, of course, all the extra rooms that will have to be created.

This is just total pie in the sky. Impossible to fund and to achieve. By the time the places have been created, the teachers trained and the schools altered, any Lib Dem administration would be out of office. There is also the public mood and the growing feeling that the state is quite big enough, thank you.

Don't even expect to read about this in the papers later or tomorrow, it is a total non-starter.