Meet Nick Clegg

While we are busily examining our neo-Confederate navels on this side of the pond, the Brits may be about to give our exhausted political assumptions the most serious poke since the Obama phenomenon of 2008.

Largely unnoticed unless you read the British press, Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg has vaulted very close to the lead in the three-way campaign to form the next U.K. government after he dazzled potential voters in the country’s first-ever televised debate in the run-up to the May 6 poll.

Clegg is not exactly a household word in the U.S., but suffice it to know that he is (1) not a Tory and (2) not a Blairite. Hey, he’s got my vote.

Anyone who could be contemplating casting a ballot for the horrible war-criminal party of Tony Blair should be scourged and bitten by scorpions. Not content with following Blair up George W. Bush’s asshole with a bowl and a spoon to join into the Iraq debacle, the Labourites then allowed American cowboy capitalism to infect their banks and nearly push the Isles into the company of the over-indebted PIIGS (Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece, Spain), any one of which may implode at short notice.

Many commentators insist that the Tories would have done the same or been even worse, but they forget that being in opposition for over a decade relieves you of direct blame. Writers in The Guardian, to cite one example, trot out lame excuses for its alleged ‘left-of-center’ party, somehow managing to forget that invading foreign countries on phony pretences pretty much scotches any claim to that label.

By our standards national elections in Britain are an expeditious affair and were expected to be rather dull. Everyone assumed that the Conservatives led by David Cameron would finally crawl back into office; then the polls showed a narrowing gap and suggested that Blair’s long-time enabler and current PM, Gordon Brown, would make it a race, perhaps resulting in what they call a ‘hung parliament’, with no party capturing an absolute majority.

That would have left Clegg’s Liberal Democrat, the country’s third party, in the powerful role of arbiter, negotiating a deal to join the cabinet for the first time as well as permanently holding the fate of the new regime in his hands since the British system permits a government to collapse at any time after a losing parliamentary vote.

But the dramatic debate threw everyone in a tizzy and now opens up the previously unimagined possibility that Clegg’s Liberal Dems might nudge past Labour for second place—or even win. The upheaval is a good indication that New Labour’s project of moving so far to the right that they have become virtually indistinguishable from the Tory fox-hunters has finally disgusted a large swatch of the British electorate, with unpredictable consequences.