ShareThisA week ago it was still possible to refer to Nick Clegg as a fringe candidate, the nerdy leader of a third-place British party who could walk down city streets without being recognized.
What has happened to him in the past seven days has no precedent in British politics, and few in elections anywhere. You probably have to reach to the world of reality television, where fellow Briton Susan Boyle rose overnight from spinsterdom to celebrity.
Clegg, leader of the centrist Liberal Democrats, is the most popular politician in Britain, with his party either leading or tied with the Tories throughout the week. An Ipsos MORI poll showed his party tied with the Conservatives at 32 percent, with Labor at 28 percent -- a doubling of the Liberal Democrat standing last week. Other polls had his party ahead.
"We have never seen anything like this sort of an instant rise before in the history of British elections, and it means that the entire system has changed, quite literally overnight," said Bobby Duffy of the London office of polling firm Ipsos MORI. "What had been a fairly staid election to choose between Gordon Brown and David Cameron has suddenly sparked into life, and nobody knows where things will go now."
After he startled Britons with his performance in the country's first-ever televised electoral debate a week ago and saw an immediate leap in popularity similar to John F. Kennedy's in 1960, the phrase "Clegg-mania" went from being a passing joke over the weekend to a bona fide phenomenon as his party continued to hold a lead in the polls.
"Nick Clegg Nearly As Popular As Winston Churchill" ran a banner headline in the normally conservative Sunday Times, arguing that not since the great wartime Tory leader has any British politician registered such high personal approval ratings.
He is now the top figure, and the two mainstream parties have become the challengers, scrambling to catch up to his act.
The 43-year-old politician is a private-school-educated Cambridge grad who made false starts as a novelist and a left-wing journalist (interning under iconoclast Christopher Hitchens) before making a splash in third-party politics. He occupies a political position that has been vacant since the Liberal Party disappeared from British politics in the 1960s.
His independent positions have won the support of surprising branches of the mainstream. Enhancing the "Clegg halo," as the papers call it, has been the endorsement this week by a key group of generals who support his promise to scrap the country's nuclear arsenal -- one of several promises that only his party was able to make.
Brown announced in a major interview with The Independent newspaper that he was now campaigning to create a "new politics" that would unite the left by bringing Labor's policies in line with the Liberal Democrats, so the two parties could govern together.
This drew an outraged response from Clegg, who has profited from the sort of ambiguity that sometimes benefits liberal parties: His economic policies are free-market enough to draw votes from alienated Conservatives, and his social policies progressive enough to appeal to Laborites.
"I think there is something desperate about the Labor Party and Gordon Brown, who try to present themselves as agents of reform," he said at a campaign stop. "I would not do any deal that would short-change the British people -- I think Gordon Brown is desperate."
But the reason for Brown's sudden courtship is clear: the better Clegg does at the polls, the better Labor does. In fact, a Liberal Democrat lead could translate into a second prime ministerial term for Brown, who won his first without being elected, after Tony Blair stepped down and handed it to him.
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
Canadian clients may not use PRINT ONLY. WEBSITES MAY NOT USE. Must credit Toronto Globe and Mail(All currency U.S.)
