We are all liberals now. Aren't we?

Socialists, especially in the USA and especially in academe, like to describe themselves as 'liberal'. It's one of those nice, caring words which they colonise in order to deny use of them to their enemies. Like 'progressive', 'liberal' has a smack of God-free sanctity about it, a benevolent glow, connoting warm bread for the poor, that sort of thing. Peace and love, man.

On the other hand, the older English-politics definition puts 'liberal' nearer to 'libertarian-Tory', as soi-disant 'liberal' Ed Milibrother discerns, distinguishing the (good, Labour-at-heart) Kennedy/Hughes faction of the Liberal Democrats from the (wicked Tory-ish) Orange Book Coalition-Cleggers whom he condemns as 'small state/civil liberties/deficit nutters'.

Ah, words. What troubles they cause.

The 'Liberal Democrats' have an existential problem intrinsically connected to the colonisation of the word 'liberal' by Socialists. The seeds of the Party's death were sown by the now sainted but actually pompous and shamelessly unscrupulous David Steel.

Steel allowed the ex-Labour Gang of Four and their followers to merge into the Liberal Party for pragmatic rather than principled reasons. And what a characteristically Liberal/LibDem manoeuvre it was, prioritising electoral-arithmetic over honest politics. Plus ca change in the Love The One You're With party. But Nemesis lurked, wearing an improbable Shirley Williams mask.

The LibDems' problem today is that their 'party' comprises two philosophically incompatible movements, one classically liberal and the other closet-socialist. The two are locked in an incoherent embrace made deadly by mutually exclusive definitions of the word 'liberal'.

The public is no less confused, insofar as it considers Clegg's party at all, which on the whole it doesn't, as Clegg himself knows only too well, hence his being on his best behaviour around the increasingly popular Conservative senior partner in coalition.

If we weren’t in a coalition now I don’t think people would take any notice of the Liberal Democrats…

You think?

The fatuous electoral apotheosis of the Liberal Democrats was the Cleggmania moment when people who know nothing whatsoever about politics, incited by a bored and mischievous media, massed in the streets to chant, "I agree With Nick!" Nothing in the dishonourable, dishevelled history of the Liberal Democrat Party epitomises it as perfectly as this, when almost everybody, according to the papers, agreed with... oh, whatever... they're just not the others, innit?

Now we have some excellent spectator sport as the Liberal Democrat Party enters its death throes. And all because successive leaders, in archetypal Liberal strategy, put vote-grabbing (and now, courtesy of some warped constituency boundaries, a temporary taste of power) ahead of conscience and (Heaven forfend) coherence.

It won't last. Not the sport, not the Party. It's probably safe for the Social Democrats to go back home to Labour now, the Stalinists having been more or less purged. Then the Orange Bookers and the Cleggist opportunists, although obviously not led by fatuous, vacuous I-Agree-With Nick, will be able to get on with resurrecting the Liberal Party of Gladstone and Lloyd George. Well, maybe not Lloyd George. We are all puritans now.

Then we will all have huge fun at Labour's expense. Is that a copy of the Limehouse Declaration in Rawnsley's top pocket?