By William Langley
Published: 11:28AM BST 25 Apr 2010
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Was it the delirium brought on by long, hot days aboard wonky-wheeled buses, nights without sleep and survival rations of stale chorizo sandwiches? Or was this really Blighty? It certainly looked like home, but as Britain’s new breed of involuntary floating voters stumbled ashore from cruise liners and ferries, they sensed there was something unsettlingly different about the place.
Suddenly, Nick Clegg, that man with the dapper dress sense and the ingratiating smirk of a tip-hungry Andalusian waiter, was being hailed as the most popular politician in British history. True, the floaters had caught bits of the action on the satellite TV news, but the cold reality was yet to hit them. “It’s like coming home to a foreign country,” they chorused.
Among those spilling forth on to the docksides of the South Coast last week there was a sense of stupefaction that the election they had left as a traditionally leisurely two-party race had been replaced by a nation stoned on Cleggmania.
“You go away for a couple of weeks, you think it would be nice to escape the election, and when you get home it’s weirder than ever,” said Sandy Mayes, a retired jeweller from Norfolk, one of the many bewildered arrivals yesterday at Southampton from the cruise ships Ventura and Grand Princess.
“It’s as though the whole thing’s gone mad. It’s supposed to be a general election, not The X Factor.”
The X that really matters, of course, is the one on your voting slip, and those fortunate enough to have missed the election action seemed dumbfounded that 30 per cent of their fellow countrymen appeared poised to give it to the long-unfancied Lib Dems. “I once voted for them for the town council,” said Mr Mayes’s wife Anne, “but nationally, I don’t know. You don’t really, do you?”
Another party of floaters, eating bacon rolls in a café on Southampton’s West Quay Road, felt the Clegg effect suggested Britain needed to rethink its whole approach to electioneering. “Squeezing the campaign into three weeks is ridiculous,” said one. “It means that a one-off thing like Clegg being good on TV can distort the whole campaign.”
If you had missed the debates it was hard to understand who the new boy was, and what had made him so popular. Many of those who had been trapped overseas by the ash cloud weren’t just skint and exhausted, but riled by the realisation that, as they sweated out the wait in faraway parts, all the attention at home had been on an overhyped TV vanity show.
“From what we’ve heard, it’s just been a load of sound bites,” fumed Tony Jones, a retired teacher from Portsmouth, as he returned with his wife Jacqueline, 55, to Plymouth after 20 hours aboard a ferry from Santander in Spain. “We’ve had no help at all. I wouldn’t vote for any of them.”
Those trapped overseas registered little appreciation for Mr Clegg’s immaculately scrubbed chops or ability to say “Scrap Trident” in five European languages. Even the fact that the 43-year-old Liberal Democrat leader had managed to have his three young children stranded on the Continent, so that he could share the voters’ pain, didn’t move them. The Joneses, for example, had been holidaying in Lagos, southern Portugal, when the Icelandic volcano erupted. “In the end,” said Mrs Jones, “we called a friend in England who has friends in Spain, and these people, who we had never met before, drove us 10 hours to the ferry port. It restores your faith in human nature. Then you come home and find the politicians don’t really care what’s happened to you. I heard Nick Clegg’s children were stuck, I reckon he’s after the sympathy vote.”
To be fair, the Clegg offspring had been paying an Easter visit to their Spanish relatives when the volcano erupted. They secured a booking on Eurostar and returned to Britain on Friday. Yet the Lib-Dem leader’s pro-Europeanism and exotic foreign lineage appeared to be more of a provocation than a comfort to those coming off the boats.
Mr Clegg, the multilingual son of a half-Russian father and Dutch mother, married to a highly paid, London-based Spanish lawyer, has frequently cited his good connections in Brussels, where he worked for 10 years, as a political advantage. However, Debbie Scott, 51, from Rayleigh, Essex, was unimpressed. “I wouldn’t vote for him,” she said, after spending £800 to get home from Madrid. “You get all this talk about European co-operation, but I didn’t see any of it. It was a shambles.”
The Shute family, from Cornwall — husband Clive, wife Alex, and children Samuel, Olivia and Holly — were equally unimpressed, arriving back five days late and £3,000 down. “It’s been an adventure, but a bit of a nightmare, too,” said Mr Shute.
The floating voters may not have resigned themselves quite yet to this strange new yellow-tinted political world. Which is significant, for after having observed – or ignored – the election from afar, they have the power to alter its course. An estimated 250,000 Britons were stranded in Europe, and tens of thousands more elsewhere around the world, and the Government’s efforts to get them home – and the flight ban which kept them from returning under their own steam – have not been widely appreciated. “I think it’s just the Government trying to deflect attention from itself,” said Amanda Nichol, 52, arriving in Plymouth with her husband Miles, 50, and daughter, Sophie, 12.
For such people, cute smiles and sound bites are a lot less attractive than effective action. It remains to be seen whether they resist Clegg’s seduction – but on the docks of the South Coast, it certainly felt like they were preparing to give the Government a bloody nose.
