Total politics have made this utterly surreal video featuring politicians, political celebrities, bloggers and others… and Guido Fawkes and Iain Dale dancing. In lieu of actually writing a blogpost before 5pm, here’s something to make your day that little bit stranger.

The last few days I’ve been realising how a popular Lib Dem party is bloody difficult to attack. When they’re unpopular its the easiest thing in the world – simply ignore them or laugh at them and they go away. Sadly the stakes are high enough that the powers that be need to move to stage 3 of the Gandhi 4 Step Programme, and that means ‘fight’.. but is it that simple?

“The Lib Dems will flounder when people look at their policies”

Doubt it. Confirmation bias suggests that the self-selecting audience of people who go looking for actual policies will want to like what they see. There’s enough sweet stuff in there to make most people feel happy about their choice. 10k income tax threshold? It’s a winner.

“Yeah but, Europe… what about Europe?”

And who’s going to bring that one up? The Tories? Doubt it – just a few days on a big Europe and/or Immigration bender will be enough to undo the last 4 years of Decontamination, leaving Cameron in the same trap that caught the legs of Hague, Duncan-Smith and Howard. He’s simply not that stupid and will be hoping that someone like UKIP – or Labour – does the dirty work. Or, perhaps, in the next Leaders’ debate the subject will come up and Clegg will be ‘exposed’ that way.

But, be warned – Clegg is compelling on Europe and shows courage in his willingness to stick to his guns against populist sentiment. When I got the chance to interview him face to face his argument was that yes the EU is messed up and needs radical reform, but pointed out that without the EU, Europe would be a continent of highly protectionist nation states far worse than they already are.  In their manifesto the first EU policy is “breaking down trade barriers” and that I can approve of. In fact, in wanting reform of subsidies and limits on what the EU spends money on, the Lib Dems are surprisingly conservative here.

I think he needs to go a lot further with his criticism and be specific about the bits he does and doesn’t like, but frankly the idea of greater European co-operation on climate change and banking regulation leaves me cold… well, more than that, I actively despise that sort of policy. The fact that they’re offering an in/out referendum seems enough to mute a lot of fear.

“The Lib Dems won’t survive the onslaught of negativity that’ll be coming their way”

It’s already started – YouGoV/Murdoch are engaging in pretty nasty push polling (h/t Alix Mortimer). Of course, if this story escapes from the blogosphere, the idea that The Establishment are terribly threatened by the Lib Dems and will do anything to hurt them will become a ‘thing’, reinforcing Clegg’s narrative of the Lib Dems being an insurgency of normal people against the powers that be…  and future negative campaigning will serve no purpose other than to harden attitudes in favour of the Lib Dems, making the situation worse for the Big Two. It’s not clear who, exactly, can make successful attacks.

“Nick Clegg isn’t really British, is he?”

I always wondered if and when Clegg’s not quite 100% pure British heritage would become an issue, and concluded that not even the British tabloids were that repulsive… but you never know. Clegg’s mother is Dutch and his father is half Russian, making him, I suppose, genetically Lib Dem. But then, Barack Obama’s middle name was Hussain and he’s Black and that wasn’t a massive problem for him.

“A vote for the Lib Dems will mean a Tory Government”

Is that a threat?

“A vote for the Lib Dems will mean a Labour Government”

I’m confused.

“A vote for the Lib Dems will mean a hung parliament”

I’m really confused.

“Yeah but they can’t win though”

What, technically? I think you’ll find they can.

“Oh, piss off. You know what I meant. They won’t win.”

So?

“But it’d be a wasted vote!”

And? That’s illegal now, is it? Let people vote how they want.

“But The Tories Will Get In!”

We’ve covered this already.

“But.. but.. Brown!”

Don’t worry. He agrees with Nick.

It would be nice to imagine that the Lib Dem surge is based on a careful, considered analysis of the platform they’re offering but even as I write that I find myself laughing at the notion. No chance.

I’m a reformed Cleggmaniac, someone who went through the process of falling in love with Nick Clegg many years ago when I rejoined the Lib Dems to vote and campaign for him as their leader. I saw him as the best hope of moving the party in a more economically liberal direction and recognised his skills as a communicator and all round handsome charmer. I was absolutely convinced that he could change the fortunes of the Lib Dems. As it happened he suffered the same problem all Lib Dem leaders do – no publicity at all outside elections – and I recall some people pointing out that despite my enthusiasm and certainty, despite Nick’s skills as a communicator, Nick had been… well… disappointing.

Between that happening and now my brain rebelled against the idea that the problem with the Lib Dems was the packaging, that if you could somehow find the right message and the right image that you could make great things happen. I began to concentrate on what was wrong with the Lib Dems underneath rather than playing the easy Turd Polishing game until eventually I left the party. Policy matters to me more than I thought.

But here we are, several years on, and suddenly that old promise for Nick Clegg seems to be turning into something real, and all I can think is how shallow and profoundly wrong it is that simply being a good communicator and telling the right story at the right time has actually worked. Are we really so pliable and easy to manipulate?

If true, the problem the Tories have more than anything else is the 4 years between Cameron becoming leader and now. They’ve not been kind to him – he’s chubbier, shinier, redder, wrinklier and with far less hair than the bright, passionate young thing that wowed people back in the day. If this really is just a beauty contest, if elections can be won or lost by the leader of a party giving the audience at home the full-on come to bed eyes treatment, Cameron may in fact be in deep trouble.

Cameron may prove the heir not to Blair, but the heir to Kinnock – someone who attempted to and understood the need for of reform his party but couldn’t seal the deal with the electorate (ironically because of taking victory for granted?). Whether this will force the Tories to reform even further, or simply find a more beautiful leader, it remains to be seen… but on the strength of this election I suspect the latter.

What it would take for the Lib Dems to break through the Labour/Conservative duopoly? My opinion is that the sort of exceptional circumstances that would allow such a thing to happen are so improbable that the possibility is usually discounted altogether.

The last “Leapfrogging” – Labour over the Liberals – emerged from a combination of factors. There wasn’t one person plotting and scheming – events simply conspired to create an inevitability that, once the dominos began falling, proved unstoppable.

But, intriguingly, there are some exceptional factors in this General Election: The previous Government has been the most corrupt in living memory. Ambient disillusionment with politics and politicians has turned into a corrosive loathing and disgust over the expenses scandal. Trust has been destroyed, confidence shattered. That’s the first domino.

The second domino is the decision to have televised leaders’ debates, and the decision to include the Liberal Democrats.

The third domino is Clegg offering a centrist, moderate, anti-establishment protest vote at the exact moment that people, more than anything, want to protest and bring down the Establishment, and the Establishment has granted Clegg a platform to get this message heard. In the debate he managed to make the case that Labour and the Conservatives represent one single organisation, and a sort of selfish power mad parasite on Britain, whilst at the same time making the Lib Dems seem to represent.. well… normal people.

It’s a fiction, of course, but it’s close enough to the truth to make a lot of people believe it… and that’s what’s fuelling Cleggmania. This leads nicely to the fourth domino: The media. Normally, you see, they don’t bother paying too much attention to the Lib Dems beyond what they’re legally compelled to. But this election? Well, there’s a whole new story because of the bizarre polling showing massive support for the third party and the Government falling into 3rd place in many polls. This reinforces Clegg’s narrative, and as it’s repeated so it becomes more and more “true”, which keeps the Lib Dems polling well and we get the 5th domino: The media story becomes, “how will Labour and the Conservatives stop Clegg?” If this were a political thriller being written, that’d be the point of no return.

There’s other dominos (social media being the least predictable) but the biggest and most exceptional of all, the one that absolutely has to fall if there’s going to be a “Leapfrogging”, is also the most terrifying: Imagine Labour fails to recover and Lib Dems remain strong. The poll is held and, despite coming third in the national vote, Labour still wins the most seats. That’s the outcome predicted from the polling taken over the weekend. Suddenly we’d have a major constitutional crisis where the ‘winner’ of the election is the least popular party with the smallest mandate. At that point, if that domino fell, Proportional Representation would become inevitable and that, I think, changes everything.

Of course this is just a story, but the story of this election is strange enough already and has wrong-footed all of us. Every day the bizarre polling continues the worse it’s going to get, too. To my own utter astonishment Mr Clegg has got me half believing he can really do this. More on this to come…

Me and my cynicism: I thought there’d be no way of judging who the winner of a stale and boring ‘debate’ between Dave, Gordon and Nick was…. and I was wrong. Really wrong.

I wanted to be as open minded and neutral as possible, but after the first round I concluded that I was failing… that I must still have some residual soft spot for the Lib Dems because, to me, Nick Clegg appeared to be… well… winning. I resigned myself to objectivity fail.

To me Cameron looked wound up tightly, his nerves clearly getting the better of him. His folksy style came across as a bit patronising and over-rehearsed… but perhaps the only problem here was the contrast with Clegg… Clegg who looked the audience at home straight in the eye and sounded confident, relaxed and strangely normal. If this is Clegg’s mask, it is a mask that never slips. Brown, as always, looked strange and awkward… but it was one of his better performances. No stutter, no mistakes… a calm and grounded performance from him that I’m sure comes at the more optimistic end of expectations.

But for me the whole thing was won by Nick Clegg during the section on cleaning up politics, where the sort of realpolitik tricks and games of the House of Commons came to bite both Cameron and Brown on the arse. Both said they supported recall of corrupt MPs and how they ‘agreed with Nick’, but then Nick said “but we put forward a vote to give people the power to sack their MPs, and Labour’s MPs voted against it and the Conservatives didn’t even bother to show up.” He got to say it twice, in fact.

Normally this sort of thing remains hidden from the public eye: “Lib Dems get something shot down” is hardly news. But the message this sent – that the other two parties want to clean up politics, but only if they themselves get to take credit for it - makes a mockery of their claims to want to make politics more honest and clean. Perhaps the leaders’ debates do actually perform a useful function in this democracy after all.

But as I watched the debate (and monitored the instant reaction from Twitter) it was obvious it wasn’t just me thinking that Clegg was actually, honestly, really winning. It was turning into some bizarre alternative universe:

Newspaper front pages started appearing announcing Clegg’s general carpeing of the diem. My housemate appeared to suffer a spontaneous conversion to the Lib Dems, joining the “We got Rage against the Machine to Number 1, now let’s get the Lib Dems into office!” facebook group, and that group gets itself another 7,000 members during and after the broadcast. Nick Clegg starts ‘trending’ as the third most talked about subject on Twitter. At one point ‘I agree with Nick’ becomes a trend, too. Polling results are sending the Lib Dems bouncing off the walls in joy. Otherwise perfectly normal people start making Obama and Indiana Jones comparisons…. I kid you not. The world, for a few hours, turned inside out. I blame the Volcano.

To say they’re a happy bunch today is quite the understatement. They are, in all seriousness, as motivated and excited as I think I’ve ever seen them, although I bet behind the scenes they’re going to start playing down expectations for the next two debates. But you know what? I’m happy for them. I’m not going to rejoin, but for one shining, beautiful moment, it became possible to imagine that Labour and the Conservatives won’t rule this country for the rest of time.

Because it’s the Lib Dem’s day I’m going to leave the final word to Millenium Dome, Elephant, one of the more bonkers Lib Dem blogs (written, as it is, by a stuffed toy), who’s written a rather more biased and amusing review of the debate:

First let’s hear the leader’s opening statements:

Captain Clegg: Hello! I’m different to the Labservatives

Mr Frown: Remember, I just destroyed the economy but the Conservatories are really, really scary

Mr Balloon: Bleep. Thank you for purchasing the Leader-bot 500. I am programmed in over six million forms of public relations.