I see that Prodicus agrees with me about the LibDems:

LibDems are notorious for saying whatever they think they ought to say to please each ad hoc audience and to hell with having said the opposite to a different audience, probably in the adjacent constituency, yesterday.

As long as they see a chance of getting their grubby hands on a little piece of whatever power is going ... Westminster, EU, change the voting system to get it, whatever ... the LibDems are in favour of it. The principle-free political party.

Apparently vanilla, portraying themselves as the Quakers (sorry, Friends) of British politics, nice to everyone (of course), pro-motherhood, pro-apple pie and ‘A vote for us is a vote against Horrid People’, the LibDems are in fact, as anyone will tell you who has come up against them in election campaigns, the most unscrupulous, dishonest, calculating, lying, vicious, character-assassin, shape-shifter hypocrites on the modern British political landscape.

I give that three out of three.  Paragraph one: they say to each voter what that voter wants to believe that they all believe.  Paragraph two: they want power.  The solution to all the world’s problems is for them to boss it about.  Paragraph three: although many voters still think the LibDems are nice, there are in fact no depths they won’t sink to in their dealings with rival politicians, in their quest for power.  They were shits long before New Labour turned that into a national policy.  About thirty years ago, I did a bit of canvassing for the Conservatives, until I found out how to be a proper libertarian.  The Conservatives and Labourites disagreed with but respected one another.  Both despised and detested the LibDems with a vehemence that was distinct and different and far more intense than they felt towards each other, for precisely the reasons referred to in Prodicus’s paragraph three.

The LibDems ought to be doing brilliantly now.  The Labour government is hated and doomed.  The regular Conservative opposition knows that horrible things will have to be done, but is suavely, repellently, reluctant to say what, or worse, even if they’ll do the necessary.  Cameron is just so bloody Eton and Oxford.  You just know that at the end of whatever “cures” he unleashes, or not as the case may be, the bloody Etonians and Oxonians will be riding high, while even Marlburians like me are floundering in the mud they have poured over everybody except themselves, let alone regularly educated, regularly working people.  And if that proves unfair to Cameron, that is surely why people are now as reluctant to be enthusiastic about him as they might be.  We greet the forthcoming Cameron regime not with enthusiasm, but with a resigned shrug.  Labour must go, so ... sigh ... Cameron it must be.

Or must it?  What of the LibDems?  This should the LibDem hour.  Yet, it is not.  Could it be that not only Prodicus thinks what he thinks, and I think what Prodicus thinks, but that about half of Britain and rising by the day now thinks this too?  The LibDems should be storming towards power, but their only voters are terminally ignorant and stupid and dying, and the rest of us are damned if we will ever replace them.  We’d rather vote for the Monster Raving Loony party.

How the LibDems must hate the internet!  The internet is that great beast in the sky that compares what LibDem A says with what LibDem B says, and spots the cavernous gap.  Worse, it compares what LibDem A says with what LibDem A says.  Voters may not notice, or even care, but the internet remembers and reminds.  If a LibDem is a Welfare Statist on Tuesday and a rabid tax cutter on Friday, it notices and it reports.  The LibDems do not deny it.  They cannot.  If a LibDem does deny it, then the beast in the sky says: ah, and who might you be?  And what, pray, have you been saying on your Tuesdays and your Fridays?

In the good old days, whenever anyone said that the LibDems were shits, the LibDems would reply: oh you’re just a Conservative, you’re just Labour, you’re the shit.  Which was often true and usually very plausible.  But the internet is Everybody.  Calling Everybody a shit just makes it that much clearer what a stupid shit you are yourself.

We all, no matter what our opinions might be, have friends or friends of friends who are in the LibDems, whom we are prepared to treat in a “present company excepted” way, and be polite to.  If they are merely using the great echo chamber of all opinions that is the LibDem party to spread our particular opinions, then okay, that’s excusable.  Stupid, but not actually evil.  But to the precise degree that we suspect these persons of taking their membership of the LibDems seriously, to the degree that we suspect them of actually believing that the way for Our Opinions to triumph is for Our Opinions to take over the LibDems and Sweep To Power (with guess who? in charge) to that degree do we detest and despise them.