There is plenty of good sport to be had with members of the Little Party. Our partners in coalition are so desperate to please, so keen to impress, that there is absolutely nothing they will not do in the hope they might be considered part of the gang. It goes way beyond mere servility. I haven't seen such a self-abasing display of bowing and scraping since having the misfortune nearly to trip over the current Chancellor during his first year at Oxford.
Now that the boot has moved to the other foot, it is inevitably Osborne who does the bully's share of the humiliating. It was George who zoned in on the victim's victim, David Laws, over the negotiating table, in an almost uncanny reprise of Dave making a play for him over cheese and crackers at a Buller reunion. Those destined for power usually have a talent for spotting potential slaves.
Everyone finds their natural place eventually and Georgie, after two decades of incessant social climbing, discovers himself standing on the ladder a rung below Dave and a rung above David. This is a stroke of extreme good luck for the Chancellor, because the proposed fall guy now has someone in position to break his fall. If we had won the election cleanly, Osborne would not have survived at the Exchequer beyond the summer. Now Laws will need to be broken before he can be removed. It's almost Wolseyian.
Those of us less concerned with status and baubles have kept busy by teasing the incomers. I have had particular fun quoting chunks of Laws's leaden prose back at him. "The purpose of the Liberal Democrat party is to offer a credible alternative to the intellectual opportunism and vacuity of David Cameron's Conservative Party" is a favourite. As is "we won't deliver Liberal Democrat policies by accepting a politically neutered post in someone else's government". Neither of these, however, matches "I may be five foot six but I've got a double First in economics from Cambridge", which manages to be not only a non sequitur, but also quadruply damaging (in Tory circles a second First is considered de trop).
Laws, as you might have guessed from his limited screen persona, reacts to this baiting very poorly. More than once he's screamed at me: "Who the hell do you think you are?" - which is one of those questions that tell you more about interrogator than respondent. And only yesterday he stood on his chair and screamed, rather unconvincingly, "Fuck off, why don't you?" Glorious stuff. Long may it continue.
