Can shaken Clegg seize his moment?

He was clear, comprehensible and radical with it. Cameron was all uplift and piety. What sensationally followed was a leap of around ten points into rough parity with the established parties, that filled the Tories with panic and pushed Labour into immediate third place.

There would be a little leakage from this new strength, but not much. Nothing very new would follow from Mr Clegg, but neither did the other two leaders really distinguish themselves. Though late in the campaign, Conservative poll figures quietly took on a certain health.

But when election night came, what startled us was not the good Tory figures – not as magnificent as the Tory rubric claims, they are a recovery long overdue from the depths dug into by three elections – but the near evaporation of the Clegg phenomenon. He fell back among the also-rans, the amateur golfers at the Open.

We did get that hung Parliament, but it is one in which David Cameron is the dominant figure.

Nick Clegg is still on stage, he does matter. But wrung dry by results which, as I did warn in an earlier piece, have turned the Clegg surge into a Clegg slump, he is now appealed to in his weakness. David, it seems, wants him for a sunbeam. Gordon is ready to make an altogether better offer. He has done very badly, but not as badly as had been expected – respectably badly. But he has office to lose and needs an ally to keep it.

So the offer is luscious: “Come into the Cabinet, into ministries, authority and the fulfilment of your policies.” It means early moves on the proportional representation which most advanced countries practise, but from which the British, led by the Tories, have stayed aloof since it was talked about around 1900. Mr Cameron has won an election, but lacks an absolute majority. Having fallen a little short of the necessary, what he really wants is another election.

His offer is modest; a commission of inquiry into “voting reform”, one of those English fixes which push anything entirely right and logical, but not suiting our chaps, off into the blue empyrean.

The case for proper PR is very strong. In this election, the Tories have a little over a third of the vote and almost half the seats. The Liberal Democrats, with above a fifth of the votes have one 13th of the seats!

Labour, long over-represented, still has some edge. With under a third of the vote they have 250-or-so seats out of 650.

But Labour’s desire to save itself involves a benign fix, a future matching of votes with seats in a coalition of two parties who have more affinities with each other than ever with the Conservatives.

Against that, for a full majority, this coalition would need small nationalist parties sweetened by favouritism. It can be done, but looks hole-and-cornerish – also vulnerable to by-elections.

Will Mr Clegg join up with people he stands a little to the left of, who hold out office and action and, through PR, no more flops like this one? Or will he take the minor concession, the consultation from outside?

Vast economic problems lurk at street corners, spitting on their hands.

There are debts. Greece is invoked, the Eurozone is threatened. Sovereign wealth is something unimaginably more despotic than the minor bureaucratic irks of the European Union. Mr Cameron shudders to his gallery, invokes the nation, talks sacrifice, does spray-on Churchill.

His address to the Lib Dems is peremptory and austere.

For very little, and against their convictions and interests, but in the patriotic cause, you understand, they may march as tolerated auxiliaries behind him.

It is the hard sell of nothing very much. It gets Cameron over his problem of not having enough votes and humiliates Clegg and Clegg’s party.

If he has any sense he will refuse it, shrug off the scare talk, take himself and Vincent Cable into Cabinet and get weaving.

There is something in Shakespeare about tides which, if not taken at the full, leave one in shoals and shallows.

I have a nasty feeling that the badly shaken Clegg will opt for paddling.