Nick Clegg, forever damned to be known as the wolf-eyed replicant of Sheffield Hallam, proposes an emergency tax on the wealthy.

What is the emergency, one wonders? Surely not a deficit of funding for public services. Nick Clegg has been as avid a cutter, both of services and taxes on the rich, as his Tory confederates. Is it not the emergency of an arrogant, soulless, vain man of little natural political nous, who has belatedly realised that the economic revival isn’t coming to save his party from oblivion before the next election? All too late, he realises that shredding the bases of his electoral support, and telling the disappointed voters to “grow up,” has permanently closed the window on his pathetic party’s bid to replace Labour. His Tory colleagues, Liberal yes men, and ovating conference goers, have not told him the truth. He is finished. Far from permanently altering British politics in favour of the Liberal Democrats, he has only ensured the dependence of he and his allies on a party, the Conservatives, that wholly despises them.

As predictable as Clegg’s latter day populism is the response of his erstwhile Tory allies. Bernard Jenkins, a senior Conservative, riposted that such a tax would pander to “the politics of envy,” and do nothing but “drive wealth abroad”: