MY PRINT column this week examines the strange mood of calm that surrounds Nick Clegg, the Liberal Democratic leader and deputy prime minister, after his party was given a thumping by voters on May 5th. Mr Clegg's detractors call him unprincipled and driven only by ambition. I genuinely think that is unfair, or fair only inasmuch as all front-rank politicians are driven by ambition. I think that the real difference is that by the tribal standards of British politics, Mr Clegg is unusually attached to reason and logic. He ponders the extravagant hatred being directed towards him and his party, and I think he concludes that mostly the British public have not yet understood the changed realities of life under a coalition government.

His critics talk of the Lib Dems breaking their pre-election promises. He replies, well I only have 8% of the MPs, how was I going to implement 100% of my manifesto? On the continent of Europe, as I have written before, he would not be facing this sort of dilemma. In countries where proportional voting systems make coalition government the norm, election manifestos are a bit like battle-plans. They set out broad directions and signal big ambitions, but everyone knows that they will not survive the first moments of post-electoral haggling.

Now, you can argue reasonably that Mr Clegg is to blame for having made a ridiculous promise to oppose higher tuition fees before the election, though he knew that it was an unaffordable pledge. But Mr Clegg is right on the broader point that the British electorate, and indeed many Lib Dem and Tory MPs, have not caught up with the implications of the hung parliament elected a year ago. In the column, I set out some of the other explanations being offered this week by top Lib Dems for their ghastly results last week, in local and regional elections and the national referendum on electoral reform. Many of them are pretty convincing, and I argue that Mr Clegg's attachment to logic and reason is a source of strength and resilience for him.

But dangers lurk too. Lib Dems are a would-be national party that only ever wins a fraction of the national vote. That poses a test: what to conclude about those who do not vote for them. Other small parties mostly represent specific regional or ideological special interest groups—they are Greens, or Welsh nationalists or whatever. So their minority votes are not felt like a rebuke. Equally, for Tories and Labour supporters, opponents can always be dismissed in tribal terms: people who do not vote for them are wicked class enemies or feckless scroungers and so on.

But for Lib Dems, whose beliefs are often more coolly cerebral than tribal, the temptation is to conclude that people who do not vote for them have not (or whisper it, cannot) grasp the subtleties of their arguments. In short, that they are too dim to vote Lib Dem. And any party that ends up blaming the voters for their failures is in real trouble. I am not saying Mr Clegg thinks his opponents are thick. But I do think his remarkable calm this week, particularly in a speech to party members on Wednesday in which he set out a whole series of rational arguments for optimism about the future, is both impressive and (paradoxically) a sign of vulnerability.

Here's the column:

FOR a British politician, Nick Clegg, the Liberal Democrat leader and deputy prime minister, takes an unusually rational view of how politics should function in his country. This is both a strength and a weakness.

An attachment to reason has its advantages, as Mr Clegg endures an extravagantly awful first anniversary of his decision to join the Conservative-led coalition government. Less Socratic figures might simply have stayed in bed. In local and regional elections on May 5th the Lib Dems suffered their worst council results since the 1980s and a thumping in Scotland, as voters variously punished a one-time party of protest for breaking campaign pledges, joining a Tory-led government or imposing spending cuts (while the Tories, to general astonishment, were rewarded with an increased haul of council seats). Most painfully, a national referendum on changing the voting rules for general elections—a referendum sought by the Lib Dems, who are disadvantaged by the current system—was lost by a margin of more than two to one, after David Cameron threw the Conservative Party's weight (and donors) behind a populist No campaign that singled out Mr Clegg for attack.

The Lib Dem business secretary, Vince Cable (who does not much like Tories), has reacted by calling coalition colleagues “ruthless, calculating and really rather tribal”. Flushed with victory, Tory right-wingers (who mostly dislike Lib Dems) are calling for Mr Cameron to get tough with his enfeebled partners, and to stop offering policy concessions to Mr Clegg.

Mr Clegg himself takes a more coolly cerebral line. Addressing party members on May 11th he acknowledged that voters were angry at Lib Dems for breaking promises made before the last general election, notably a pledge to oppose rises in university-tuition fees. But in 2010 both Tory and Labour manifestos had signalled support for higher tuition fees. As Lib Dem leader, he went on, he could not deliver 100% of his manifesto with just 8% of MPs: “You can't be in favour of coalition politics, but against the compromises that coalition necessarily entails.” The Conservatives had also ditched or postponed cherished policies, he noted, on renewing Britain's nuclear deterrent, cutting inheritance tax, picking fights with Europe and building prisons. If Britain kept electing coalitions, Mr Clegg mused, future manifestos might have to signal which pledges are more cherished than others.

In private, Mr Clegg and his inner circle cling to reason as closely as in public. Yes, last week's results were dreadful, they say, but the coalition will not break up: going to the country now would be fatal. Mr Clegg is safe too, they say: no credible challenger would want his job at the moment. The logic is leavened with self-deprecating jokes. If Mr Cameron is Teflon Man, escaping voter wrath over cuts, they jest, Mr Clegg is Velcro Man, to whom all calamities currently stick.

But exasperation also peeps through. Mr Clegg has a habit of deriding opposing arguments as “complete and utter nonsense”, and dismissing setbacks as unavoidable. Nobody denies that the Lib Dems did very badly in northern England and Scotland. But, the Clegg camp responds, the Tories were wiped out in the big northern cities years ago, leaving only the Lib Dems for government-haters to kick. Down south, they argue, the Conservatives gained from a splintering of the anti-Tory vote, as some ex-Lib Dems recorded protest votes with Labour or the Greens. Yes, admits a Clegg ally, it now looks disastrous to have sought a referendum on the complicated preferential voting system known as the alternative vote (AV). But AV was all that Labour or the Tories would accept by way of electoral reform and at least offered the promise of extra Lib Dem seats. The advice from European sister parties was that junior partners suffer in coalition: electoral reform looked like vital insurance against such losses.

And yes, says another senior strategist, it now looks a mistake for Mr Clegg to have endorsed Tory policies so warmly in the coalition's first months, and to appear to be Mr Cameron's chum. But with multiparty rule key to Lib Dem ambitions, the Clegg inner circle believed that the British public needed convincing, from the start, that coalition government works.

Never blame the voters

Lots of erstwhile Lib Dem voters are “not very rational”, regrets a senior MP. Canvassing before May 5th, he told many that the alternative to a coalition with the Tories would have been a minority Conservative government, possibly followed by a snap election which Mr Cameron would have won outright. Furious ex-Lib Dems said that they would have preferred that outcome.

To be fair, irrationality crosses party lines. Tory right-wingers calling for Mr Cameron to act more like a winner and start squelching the Lib Dems are defying the logic of the 2010 general election. Only together do the Tories and Lib Dems command a parliamentary majority. Until the next election, only the Tories and Lib Dems, between them, have a hope of forming a stable government. Separately, the Tory, Lib Dem and Labour parties are just losers of differing size. From that, everything else flows.

Mr Clegg understands this better than many British politicians, and indeed voters. Just now, his rationality makes him unexpectedly resilient. He believes his party's hopes lie in a full five-year coalition, culminating in an economic recovery for which the Lib Dems will claim a share of the credit. He always knew that 2011 would be a grim year.

But reason gets you only so far, and exasperation with the public is a deadly sin. Voter tribalism and gut instinct dealt the Lib Dems a brutal blow on May 5th. Explaining that result does not change it. To recover, the Lib Dems will need to find new voters. They will not be won by telling the public why it is wrong.