The media has gone mad about the infighting among the LibDems. Who knew what, who knifed who in the back, who is loyal to Nick Clegg and who is not. Then there is the controversial matter of the polls, in particular the one gathered in Danny Alexander’s constituency of Inverness, Nairn, Badenoch and Strathspey. It would seem that the locals don’t like him much these days.
It’s been an entertaining day on the blogs and the comments sections of the online newspapers. What I have found hilarious is the seemingly penny drop moment that appears to happened across the UK.
Apparently everyone has just realised that Danny Alexander is a Tory!
Cue massive disappointment and anger. Many commentators are seething with ill feeling towards Danny Alexander and see him as an arch traitor to strongly held LibDem beliefs. He’s been portrayed as a poodle of George Osborne, as an enemy of the poor and the vulnerable. Students hate him, the media hate him, it seems no one has a good word to say about him.
It would appear that his crime is to have been a loyal and willing contributor to the Conservative led policies that have seen the poor punished for the economic downturn.
He’s betrayed his principles, his left wing guiding star.
Of course all these commentators are correct but they are also all wrong.
You see Danny Alexander hasn’t betrayed any long held, principled beliefs that he may once have held.
Danny never held any that could recognisably be thought of as LibDem. He may have talked the talk, pressed the right flesh at conferences and generally done the right thing in ascending through the LibDem hierarchy to be selected as a candidate for Westminster, but he was never progressive nor left wing.
Among the many examples of charlatans that have conned their way into a political career Danny Alexander has to be up there with the worst (or best if you admire liars and con artists).
What irks me most about him is that it was blindingly obvious from the very beginning of his career as a would be MP that he was a fraud.
He followed the usual path by reading Philosophy, Politics and Economics (PPE) at St Anne’s College, Oxford. That should be a warning sign to anyone who takes an interest in politics. Unfortunately most constituents don’t and hence the success of many a professional careerist like Alexander.
His career prior to being an MP was another indicator of his true intensions. In 1993 and 1994, Alexander worked as a press officer with the Scottish Liberal Democrats, before spending eight years as the Director of Communications at the European Movement (1996–1999) and its successor organisation, the Britain in Europe campaign (1999–2004). If you are a political nerd then feel free to read up on this organisation. I’m not going to knock it’s intensions but it’s hardly a place to nurture a young mind about the real lives of the majority of the inhabitants of the Europe and as far as giving meaningful insight into the lives of people struggling with poverty or struggling socially within Fanny’s (that was an accidental typo, but I’m going to keep it) eventual constituency, you can forget it.
Then he rounded off his preparation for progressive left wing political representation in 2004 and 2005 by becoming the Head of Communications for the recently formed Cairngorms National Park Authority.
So much for life experience then.
As far as I was concerned he was a dangerous career opportunist, a Tory and a fraud.
I was right then and I’m right today.
What I think is really important in the Danny Alexander story is the way that he has pulled the wool over the eyes of not only Scots voters but how he has totally let down English and Welsh people as well. His arrogance is breathtaking, his lies almost overwhelming and his eventual extinction as a politician all the more deserved because of this.
There is nothing wrong in being a Tory, holding their beliefs and being prepared to stand up and justify those beliefs. As long as you are honest about it. You can then debate with those who may hold a different viewpoint.
Danny Alexander is more than obviously a Tory, wearing LibDem clothing and it is that crime that is most nauseating. There are very many people out there who genuinely believed that the LibDems could and would provide an answer, in a UK context, to the ills that they perceive are dragging down society. There was just one big problem; there was a cuckoo in the LibDem nest.
The LibDem experience is no different to that of Scottish Labour. The Lib Dems have simply been infiltrated by careerists gangsters who only have their egos and bank balances at heart. Thankfully there appears to be UK wide movement of awakening among the general voter population that has realised, somewhat belatedly, that the MPs who have taken their party into a suicidal coalition with the Tories are nothing but Tories as well.
Welcome to the real world.
Hopefully Danny Alexander and co will go the way of all cheats and fraudsters but my cherished wish is that the good people of Inverness, Nairn, Badenoch and Strathspey, where incidentally, I lived for many years (just in case you’ve wondered), see the light and reject this man. They simply deserve better political representation.
The truly comical outcome of all this is the way that Danny Alexander will be remembered. True, he will have a legacy as an axe man; the man who willing stood in front of the cameras and justified the actions of the odious George Osborne. Danny will be the bogey man who dragged the Liberals over the precipice into political extinction, who grounded them on the rocks and steered the SS LibDem into the iceberg. He’ll be all these things and more.
I hope he’s proud of his achievements.
But the most unforgettable way that Danny Alexander will be remembered; the legacy that he will carry to his grave; the title that will forever be associated with Daniel Grian Alexander is;
Beaker the Ginger Rodent!
Whitefeatherclub 
I agree that Danny Alexander is a Tory pretending to be a LibDem, but is the same not true of Nick Clegg and Vince Cable? The LibDems have quite a few cuckoos in their nest, I think.
The most honest thing the current LibDem party could do is to merge with the Tories; perhaps the remaining LibDems who actually have some liberal principles might get the message and set up a new party that might be worth voting for.
“He may have talked the talk, pressed the right flesh at conferences and generally done the right thing in ascending through the LibDem hierarchy to be selected as a candidate for Westminster, but he was never progressive nor left wing.”
What Lib-Dems are progressive or left wing? If you take David Steel, Tavish the Viking and Willie Rennie as their Scottish representatives then they vary from old school establishment through paranoid British nationalist to small town conservative.
Which of these three would you consider left wing or progressive?
Danny Boy is what he is. For the establishment and for the union and with an eye on a seat in the Lords. In other words a typical Lib-Dem.
That’s my point; the LibDems have been trying to appeal to the Left and many supporters voted for them on that basis. None of the above that you mention are left wing but the Party attempts to sell itself on a Left platform. Certainly many activists would consider their party as being of the left and progressive. I completely agree with you with your summary of Danny Boy but I would add that he has always been politically a Tory and that’s my point; the LibDems, like the Labour Party, have been wholly infiltrated by careerists, who to a man and woman, are for the Establishment, the Union and the Lords.
Danny Boy is my MP. I can readily agree that he is on a shoogly peg for 2015 if we get there. But I have the benefit of close observation through having a friend who is a Highland Liberal stalwart who regularly entertains Danny at her home for Party functions and meetings.
These people like the Labour party are tribal. They are more concerned about winning for their side than anything else. The future of Scotland doesn’t come into it. Typically, their starting point is that Danny is one of their own whom they have nurtured. Everything else falls in behind that stated fact.
The irony in this particular case is that my friend’s brother, now deceased was an SNP stalwart.
Danny reminds me of my years that I lived in Australia. When big companies wanted a dirty job done i.e. sacking somebody in management they always hired what we called a ‘Toecutter’. That’s Danny.
You lost me at the Ginger Rodent.
“Gingerism” is the last acceptable racial slur, and it’s not funny.
I agree about the rest of it.
I’ll de-ginger the humour in the future.
Let’s just call hi8m a rat then…
Lib-Dem?
The cover your bourgeois arse option intensified geometrically in, and around about, the political nether regions of UKANIA since the mutually pimping machinations of Owen and Thorpe et al.
Blow jobbing all political options, within the Westminster brothel and its franchises, at an ever more rapid rate of knots ever since Gladstone slept with multiple prostitutes but did not bone any them out of “piety”.
Beaker?
Danny Boy?
The school sneak and go to prefect for back-stabbing and wannabe hard-man for the Upper School.
A Lord Snooty fan since his youth unto his current state of infantilism?
.A BAS with him and the whole shebang of them.
Look at the picture. He actually has two faces.