YOU may have heard of Nick Clegg. He is the Deputy Prime Minister of an illiberal and uncaring government that has run Britain for the past five years. Under Clegg, the number of people seeking emergency help from food banks has soared from 61,648 in 2010 to more than one million last year. Clegg’s defence – that he and his LibDem colleagues have somehow kept the Tory wild beast in its political cage – will not be understood by people being deliberately “sanctioned” by the Department of Work and Pensions for allegedly not trying hard enough to find work, who now have to rely on private charity to feed their children.

As for “saving Britain” from economic collapse – Clegg’s other explanation for propping up David Cameron’s lacklustre administration – tell that to the record 697,000 people on zero-hours contracts. Clegg’s so-called economic miracle consists of the reintroduction of Victorian labour practices. Then he has the effrontery to claim credit for “persuading” George Osborne that it is not worth bothering to levy income tax on the few mites thus earned.

Normally I wouldn’t waste words on Nick Clegg, who will have trouble retaining his parliamentary seat next week. The latest Ashcroft poll puts him two points behind his Labour opponent in Sheffield Hallam. However, with breathtaking arrogance, our Nick has suddenly decided to try and save the LibDem bacon by selling his party’s MPs to the highest coalition bidder. Fortunately, it looks like the LibDems will be lucky to return to Westminster with 27 of their current 57 seats. That’s too few to provide Cameron or Miliband with a Commons majority. Current projections give the Tories circa 274 seats and Labour 269 – though it could swing either way on the night. So Nick Clegg (or his instant successor) is unlikely to be king maker.

Nick Clegg knows this. So in order to keep the LibDems in business, he is trying a desperate manoeuvre. First he has declared that he said he will not join a coalition with Labour that involves a “confidence and supply” arrangement with the SNP. Clegg justifies this by saying the SNP is a threat to constitutional order, a view supported by many Tory grandees. Second, Clegg argues that any coalition with the party that finishes second – Labour, on current projections – will lack "legitimacy".

It doesn’t take a genius to see that Nick Clegg wants to get back under the duvet with David Cameron. Far from being centrists, Clegg and allies such as David Laws and Danny Alexander are with the Tories on economic issues. Just as in 2010, Clegg is now acting to engineer a Tory return to Downing Street, where he will give a “liberal” cover to what the Institute of Fiscal Studies predicts could be the deepest and fastest fiscal consolidation seen in a major industrial economy.

Start with Clegg’s claim that an arrangement between a minority Labour administration and the SNP would be constitutional dynamite because Nationalists want Scottish independence. On the contrary, the real potential for constitutional instability derives from the British parliamentary establishment ganging up to exclude the majority of elected Scottish MPs from participating in the governing of what is supposed to be a united kingdom. As well as being an affront to the democratic will of the Scottish people, it tells Scots they are only allowed to elect the MPs that suit Nick Clegg and his ilk. One might see the ghost of an argument in Clegg’s illiberal veto on SNP participation in UK governance if – God forbid – the independence movement sought to pursue its aims by non-democratic means. On the contrary, the SNP has been a model to the world in how to seek self-government peacefully.

This new Clegg doctrine ostracising the SNP politically is in stark contrast to the approach of the late, great Jo Grimond, leader of the old Liberal Party from 1956 to 1967. Or of Ludovic Kennedy, the great Scottish Liberal activist and journalist. In 1967, Kennedy arranged a meeting between Grimond, David Steel and the SNP’s Billy Wolfe to discuss common action over Home Rule. True, there was dissention in Scottish Liberal ranks over such cooperation and Kennedy subsequently left the party when it came to nothing. Grimond always regretted the failure to make common cause with the SNP and in November 1969 advocated publically that the Liberals should give the Nationalists a clear run in the South Ayrshire by-election (won, incidentally, by Labour’s Jim Sillars). Where Nick Clegg is pursuing classic Liberal deviousness is in seeking a pact with the Tories to destroy left-wing opponents. Back in the early 1920s, when Labour was emerging as a party with a significant parliamentary presence, the Liberals and Tories in Scotland routinely withdrew candidates in favour of each other, rather than split the vote and let the Socialists in.

What about Clegg’s contention that the minority party that wins the most seats has the sole legitimate right to form a government? For starters, this convention is not found in any statute. Second, the will of the voters matters more than one party having a modest plurality of seats. If, on May 7, the UK electorate gives an overall Commons majority to progressive parties, including both Labour and the SNP, then it would be undemocratic for Clegg to try and lever David Cameron back into Downing Street. True, if the Tories are the largest single party by a nose, Cameron is likely to demand first dibs at putting together a working majority. So what? The progressive majority can immediately vote him down.

We’ve been here before. In the General Election of December 1923, the ruling Tories lost 86 seats but remained the largest single party, with 258 seats. Upstart Labour, under Ramsay MacDonald, increased its score to 191. The Liberals managed third place with 158. Tory Prime Minister and steel tycoon Stanley Baldwin tried to cling to power but the Liberals refused to support him. Nevertheless, Baldwin went through the constitutional motions, as leader of the largest party and sitting PM, hoping to provoke a split in the Liberal ranks. The new parliament met on January 16 1924, with a King’s speech written by Baldwin. But on January 21, this was voted down by Labour and Liberal MPs. Baldwin had to resign and Ramsay MacDonald was called to the palace to become Labour’s first ever Prime Minister, albeit of a minority government.

The one thing that emerges from Clegg’s desperate intervention is that the Westminster Establishment is revving up to block any move to a progressive UK administration. The demonisation of the SNP is part of this. But Ed Miliband should be mindful that ultimately these scare tactics are also aimed at keeping Labour out of power. The solution is a working arrangement between a minority Labour government and the SNP, based on an end to austerity. The last thing most people want to see, north or south of the Border, is David Cameron and Nick Clegg sniggering again in the Downing Street Rose Garden.