Politics between the extremes – some highlights

Nick Clegg's account of the coalition and its aftermath is an insightful and in many places startlingly frank account. This is not a complete review, though do buy and read the book for yourself, but I'll pick up a few of the issues raised.

Nick devotes a chapter to "the plumage of power" - looking at how a government anchored in the centre ground by Liberal Democrats ended up appearing from the outside merely to be run by unusually moderate Conservatives. One aspect of this was being seen with the trappings of power. The value was understood all along by Conservatives - because they live for this sort of thing. Speaking at the door of number 10, etc. There's a fascinating contrast between the coalition DPM who had a veto on government policy but no real visible trappings - and, say, the US Vice President who is well adorned with plumage, but whose powers are 'not worth a bucket of warm spit'.

The lesson may seem obvious with hindsight - demand the pomp commensurate with the role. I guess we thought it pompous and silly. And no doubt had Nick demanded the use of the Number 10 front door, or another office with a grand entrance, for the TV cameras, the opposition would have said that that was all he was in it for.

Another chapter examines continental experiences with coalition from the point of view of the smaller party. The Dutch, we are told have a phrase: Burgemeester in Oorlog - to be a mayor in wartime - under the Nazi occupation, Dutch mayors could either resign and be replaced by a stooge or stay and become compromised. Neither choice was a vote winner. (That is not to cast the other parties as Nazis - but the dilemma, of having to choose between symbolic purity and the the consequences of your actions, will upset many whichever way you go.) This chapter then analyses the what happened and why on the effect of the coalition on the party's electoral support. There are lessons to be learned with hindsight but there are also factors that were outside our control. Labour's choice to target Lib Dem voters with much greater effort than they did Conservatives was one factor. Another was the unexpected effect of the SNP driving moderate English voters towards the Conservatives for fear of a government at the mercy of special pleading for Scotland.

A third chapter looks at the EU referendum, with some interesting insights into the differences in what Europe means to its founders, to the southern and eastern additions, and to the UK. We had a referendum because of a failure of Conservative Party management, arising in turn from a war between the two halves of the Conservative brain: the home, hearth, heritage, nuclear family and King James Bible on the one hand, and the innovative free market capitalists, skeptical of government ability to 'buck the market' on the other.

The actions of generations of Conservatives have exploded the myth that Britain retains any meaningful economic sovereignty of its own. Yet this is the same party that goes beserk if Britain is outvoted in the EU Council of Ministers on technical amendments to the third widget directive. They have rubbed our noses in the idea that we have no alternative to being open to the world economically, while at the same time recoiling from the implications of that very openness.

The referendum debate is characterised as one that pitted the politics of reason, imperfection and compromise against those of anger, utopianism and grievance. This is also a larger theme of the book, looking at the lessons and challenges for liberal, plural and internationalist politics in the age of Trump, Corbyn and having "had enough of experts". Nick talks about the need for a more emotionally powerful message and calls on us to assert our positive patriotism in contrast to the patriotism of fear and isolation of the populists.

It's good advice, though we are in danger of telling the angry that they're not being reasonable, and telling those who have reasoned from false premises (decades of lies about the EU) that they are just being angry. That wouldn't work.

* Joe Otten is a councillor in Sheffield and Tuesday editor of Liberal Democrat Voice.