Now The Kingmaker Wants To Be King

Not content with trying to call the shots over who'll be prime minister, upstart Clegg has now declared himself up for the top job, flying in the face of parliament. Unsuspecting voters duped by the Clegg sham are sleepwalking into democratic disaster.

Bold as brass, joker in the pack Clegg insisted that he was "not being arrogant or presumptuous about his chances, but he had set his sights high". Yeah, sure.

And the justification for this sudden bout of prime ministerial posturing? Clegg told The Times that it was "still possible that his party could poll more votes than either the Conservatives or Labour."

Er, what part of parliamentary democracy doesn't Euro-boy understand? It's not the stacked up number of votes than count - but the number of parliamentary seats. That's how we do things over here.

The Orange Party warned in the past that Cocky Clegg was turning into Danger Mouse trying to call the shots with a party holding the balance of power without the mandate of the biggest number of seats.

European-style coalitions may suit Clegg down to a tee but the LibDem leader seems to have ignored the current tradition of parliamentary democracy.

MPs are elected to parliament and it is in that electoral college where the party with a majority of seats forms a government. It is that majority party which elects the prime minister. Kinda called the 'constitutional arrangement'. Geddit?

LibDems currently fighting to hold on to a mere 63 seats cannot hope to form a majority party. New Labour's rigged electoral advantage will see to that.

But in rides Clegg still riding high on the back of a single TV talent show debate now a wannabe PM? Is he having laugh? He wouldn't last five minutes.

In the real world of Westminster, Labour Party stalwarts look on 'Liberals' with as much distaste as they do Mandy. Tories try to ignore them. The 'libs' and the 'dems' are a motley bunch of decent left-wingers and jaded, faded social democrats ready to fight like ferrets in a sack at the drop of a hat.

As Simon Jenkins points out in the Guardian today "The truth is that a kingmaker is never a king. Once in power kings acquire leverage of their own."

The Orange Party is starting to feel a little queasy penning a political polemic: Election 2010 where did it all go wrong?

The central character is a minority Westminster party propped up by a fawning media class bending over backwards to give equal time to all three Westminster parties while excluding the Celtic nationalists. Fine if you view the world from the Westminster bubble but not if you turn the country upside down.

But as the Orange Party has pointed out before, such a move suits the Mandy dream of an everlasting New Labour project where the Broonites are kicked out and Mandy fulfils his lifelong love of foreign affairs as part of Phoney Blair's new European order backed up by Euro-boy Clegg.

Trying to call the shots, dictating who should or should not be prime minister in a badly hung parliament, is one thing - putting yourself on a pedestal up for prime minister is quite another.

Yesterday a credit rating agency damned basket-case Greece to "junk status". Fixations on a badly hung parliament and the resulting chaos is not the way to win friends and influence people in the money markets.

All three Westminster parties are being slammed for not coming clean with voters on the true extent of the swingeing spending cuts and public sector job losses on the cards whatever the outcome of the election.

Instead Clegg uses The Times to put his own personal ambition before the best interests of the country.

Heaven knows the Orange Party has done its share of Brown bashing over the years and is still twitchy over whether Dave would morph into showman Blair. But electoral reform is a vexed issue that should be dealt with after the election not used as a political posturing bargaining tool before hand.

"I want to be prime minister", declared Clegg. The Orange Party is mindful of the old slogan with which mums around the land berate their children - I want never gets.