Lesley Riddoch: Stardust and false promises don't mix

Celebrities defect from the Lib Dems. I'm sorry darling, which celebrities? Don't the masses have to have heard of them first for "celebrity" to count?

Bella Freud - well, without the big hint in the surname, I'd need a bit of help to know what she does for a day-job.

Then there's wotshername that wrote that great book about wotsit. I didn't realise she was also a model. Ah, that's Kate Moss. Yes, the one without an e.

However there is only one Mr Darcy for under 30s, and he is Colin Firth who also starred in Bridget Jones's Diaries.

The relatively old Mr Firth is indeed regarded as dishy and handsome by the elusive but unaccountably important yoof vote.

But there's the rub. If students did vote and the mystique of looking presentable and making sense beside old geezers on the box worked, then Nick Clegg might be sending his charming, offspring-created cards from Number 10 this Christmas.

But he's not. Remember the lead Clegg took in the TV pre-election debates? Remember "I agree with Nick"?

Remember the fear that stalked the "old" parties as the Lib Dems' ratings went stratospheric? And remember the look on his face when the Lib Dem leader's face on election night when it became apparent that the momentary nationwide rush of radical blood to the head had not translated into votes or seats?

A bit like the look on Pamela Stephenson's face when high scores from the judges did not protect the only granny finalist in Strictly Come Dancing from an early bath.

The mainstream is an easy act to challenge but a tough act to beat.

As Nick Clegg knows.

All the novelists, famous-ish MPs' daughters, possible Screen Actors Guild winners in the world won't create a permanent modal shift in voting loyalties amongst Tory-voting middle Englanders or Labour-leaning city dwellers.

Lib Dem votes have almost always proved to be on loan from one or other of the "big two".

Britain is still a class-ridden society in which a party without roots in either labour or capital will struggle to survive. New Labour managed to cross that Great Divide - at great cost. But now that gamble has failed, Labour can at least fall back on its core support. Labour has roots. The Tories have money. What have the Lib Dems got except a loyal Celtic Fringe?

In the Highlands, the stubborn Kingdom of Fife, the Welsh coastal plains and the Brethonic South-west, loyalty to the party of 19th century crofting, voting and land reform remains high.

Voters in those remote and country seats are a lot less likely to defect from the Lib Dems than urban voters who have expectations of local service provision.Rural voters pride themselves on self-sufficiency. And as long as country voters define themselves, in part as not being urban - with all the love of convenience and feather-bedding that implies - it won't matter a damn what well-known Islington residents make of Nick Clegg.

Indeed I'm sure some Lib Dem voters think David Steel is still leader - that young fellow who took over from Jeremy Thorpe. Lib Dem voting isn't about the leader, the policies or the slogans. It's about identity and tradition.

So meltdown isn't likely for the Lib Dems - the fact headline writers even view 11 per cent as meltdown is a back-handed compliment for a party which has bumped along in just those electoral doldrums from several decades. Eleven per cent would indeed represent meltdown for Labour, Tories or the SNP. But not for the Lib Dems.

How long did the Lib Dems really expect to keep a voter like Billy Bragg - the left-wing singer and English Parliament campaigner - who declared his support for Clegg before the election because "they've got the best manifesto?"

Last week he accused the party of betrayal over tuition fees saying: "the student protesters of this winter of discontent are my heroes."

If only they would start a new political party - but they probably won't.

The Lib Dems can no more tweak their battered image than Scotland can transform its poor "brand rating" in the eyes of international investors by fiddling with the packaging.

Our lamentably poor infrastructure, long-hours and family-unfriendly culture and under-investment in research are visible miles away, no matter how many castles, lochs and kilts are cunningly placed in the foreground.

In the same way the Lib Dems cannot transform the fringe nature of their core support by adding a few cerebral (and awkward) celebs to pre-election line-ups.

Worries about Vince Cable's "let them eat cake" appearance on the Strictly Come Dancing Christmas Special are also misplaced.

The glum Business Secretary will not permanently alienate or win over recession-hit voters however gaily he foxtrots.

What the Lib Dems have to offer is not a tribal home - like all the other parties bar the Greens - but an outlook and a string of sensible ideas about how to do politics differently.

Proportional representation, local income tax, localism and federalism - the Lib Dems big policy goals all tackle the means not the ends of policy. Fairness in how things are done will create fair outcome too. So Lib Dems get more excited about dry, technical, enabling measures than the emotional battles that divide the opposition.

They say a bad tradesman blames his tools.

So Lib Dems are easy to characterise as inept politicians who blame lack of transparency, the first past the post voting system and the centralised nature of government.Bad tradesmen who scrutinise the tools of governance when others examine its quality, direction or class, and vote, based outcomes.

It's easy to scoff at Nick Clegg for trading the party's innocent image and tuition fees abolition pledge for a rigged vote on an unpopular form of PR, on a date contested by pro-PR nationalist parties across the UK.

Like Jack and the Beanstalk, Nick Clegg appears to be the pantomime fool - exchanging something with value in the here and now for the mere promise of something better in the blue yonder.

And yet, the Beanstalk which led Jack into a world of confrontation with giants, also led to transformational change.

PR would be a gamechanger in British politics - even using AV.

The odds are stacked against Nick Clegg, but they always were.

His swansong can be written after next May's referendum, not before.