"The future is not my period,"

... said the history don, chortling over his port. It's not mine, either, but I will relinquish a very tiny hostage to Fortuna.

At the next General Election the Liberal Democrats will be as mendacious and unscrupulous as ever in their campaigning. The Dave-Nick love-in will last five years and no longer. Possibly less. After that, it will be business as usual.

The LibDems, led by Clegg and (dead-in-the-water) Huhne, will nail their yellow (sic) colour to the mast of Fairness. Cowley Street will stock up on small onions to make sure that LibDem spokesmen (and Olly Grender) weep bitter, bitter tears on all channels, wailing in chorus that they devoted all their energies over the past five years to holding back the vicious Tories. It would all have been soooo much worse without them, without the exclusively LibDem instinct for Fairness. But for Nick, Cameron would have been Thatcher II.

Oh, how they wish they could have done more! But, sob, even a party of secular saints like the LibDems could only do so much, sniff, being the junior partner in the Coalition. They will claim 100 per cent of the credit for anything vaguely green or 'caring' done by the Coalition, in the teeth (natch) of Tory opposition. (Lucky that Cabinet Minutes are locked up for so long, innit?) They will shake their heads in sorrow, bemoaning their inability to ameliorate further the horrid (Tory) austerity measures, sympathetic frown ... in which they are presently cooperating because (Oh yeah, 'Labour made it inevitable, BTW' and anyway) better be in power at any cost (we're LibDems after all) than not.

In order to retain the 2010 votes they borrowed from a Labour Party temporarily disabled by Gordon Brown, votes which are now zooming back home at a catastrophic rate, the Liberal Democrats will play the Hughes gambit and look Left. They will hope that their cynicism isn't totally transparent and doesn't make too many voters reach for the sick-bags and the over-ripe fruit. Except in Tory-LibDem seats, obviously, where the Orange Book will be the bible and their literature will be Righter than Right.

Labour and the LibDems will both attack the Conservatives with everything they've got. Given the poisonous legacy which Gordon Brown made very sure to leave to Cameron, the guns firing at the Conservative Party will be numerous, huge and loud. And possibly devastating unless, of course, the electorate has grown up and grasped reality with both hands. Or unless, maybe, something else happens.

I already told you, the future is not my period. But history teaches us that leopards don't change their spots.