The Liberal Democrat's Perpetual Crisis

So Labour's won a by-election. Fuck-a-doodle-doo. It's only a seat that they've had since 1997 - which is also the year when this particular constituency was created. Honestly, you crazy labour types - you're going to have to do better than this at the next General Election if you want to win back Number 10.

But what amuses me is the Lib Dem response to this by-election defeat (man alive, Elwyn Watkins must be massively tired and hacked off by now). We have had Nick Clegg attempting to achieve great new things in the realm of platitudes by noting that "it's a challenging time for Liberal Democrats". Well yes, yes it is. For the first time ever, you have political power. And it hasn't been as easy as it looked to be when you were carping from the sidelines, eh?

But then again, when haven't the Lib Dems been facing challenging times? The drop in support owing to their coalition with the Tories is only the latest in a long line of crises. In fact, since the Ginger Drunk resigned, they've had nothing but crisis after crisis. There was the post-Kennedy leadership debacle contest that ended with the election of the least charismatic man in history as Lib Dem leader. The fall of Ming the Merciful so soon after his election allowed the party to choose Nick Clegg as their new leader. And, lest we forget, Clegg said and did nothing as Lib Dem leader until he was allowed to debate with the big boys (well, both Brown and Cameron are a little portly) on TV. And as a result, his party was lucky not to lose a large proportion of their seats at the last election; any chance of a breakthrough was simply hype.

Pretty much since the Ginger Drunk jumped on a populist bandwagon by (quite rightly, in retrospect) opposing the Iraq War, the Lib Dems have been in crisis. So these may be challenging times for Britain's perennial third party, but that is nothing new for that party. They've lurched from crisis to crisis for the past few years like a political version of Gordon Brittas; this election result is nothing more than business as usual for the ever amateurish Lib Dems.