A little boy goes to his
dad and asks, 'What is Politics?'

Dad says, 'Well son, let
me try to explain it this way:

I am the head of the
family, so call me The Prime Minister.

Your mother is the administrator of the money,
so we call her the Government.

We are here to take care of your needs,
so we will call you the People.
The nanny, we will consider her the Working Class.

And your baby brother,
we will call him the Future.

Now think about that and see if it makes sense.'

So the little boy goes
off to bed thinking about what Dad has said.

Later that night, he hears his baby brother crying,
so he gets up to check on him.

He finds that the baby has severely soiled his nappy.

So the little boy goes
to his parent's room and finds his mother asleep.
Not wanting to wake her,
he goes to the nanny's room.
Finding the door locked, he peeks in the keyhole
and see's his father in bed with the nanny.

He gives up and goes back to bed.

The next morning, the little boy say's to his father,
'Dad, I think I understand the
concept of politics now. '

The father says, 'Good, son,
tell me in your own words what you think
politics is all about.'

The little boy replies,
'The prime Minister is screwing the Working Class while the Government is sound asleep.
The People are being ignored and
the Future is in deep sh*t.'

We don't need it for the battles we have nowadays, except to pander to paranoia. Truth is it wouldn't take that many nukes to pretty much rape the planet of an atmosphere that we can breathe so whoever uses them has nothing to gain. Plus the US and Russia still have huge arsenals, I see very little need for anybody else to want them.

Non-proliferation treaty. Not a non-replacement treaty.

Like I say I'm not well versed on it, but I thought by replacing you would be using more advanced, perhaps more powerful, technology and warheads which would be in contravention.

Mind you my brain could quite easily just be telling me lies and making stuff up again.

I'm voting for the Lib Dems, mostly for two reasons:

1) They're the only party who have been consistent on civil liberties - I don't trust the Conservatives to defend my freedom beyond scrapping ID Cards. The Lib Dems have proposed a whole raft of policies including making it harder for public authorities to put CCTV everywhere.

2) I like their plan to raise the tax threshold to £10,000. Not only will this have the benefit of helping out the poorest people the most, but most people will be £700 per annum better off (on average). That's £50-£60 per month I'd welcome with open arms, especially with the way the cost of food and fuel is going.

The emails have started already:

Let Clegg enjoy his moment. Next week the horror begins

A coalition will split Nick Clegg's own party and make no progress on PR. His best bet is to grab a plum job and quit the Lib Dems

Poor Nick Clegg. He is about to have the worst month of his political life. Lauded to the skies as another Churchill, another Obama, a weather changer and a kingmaker, he must know that this is as good as it gets. Next week he may be hanging a parliament, but from the moment he does, it will hang him.

Centre parties in coalitions rarely live long to tell the tale. Attempts at leverage over coalitions devastated the Liberals at Westminster throughout the 20th century and have since wrecked their fortunes in Scottish and Welsh parliaments. There is no reason why the 21st century should be different, however frantically political commentators want it make it so. The truth is that a kingmaker is never a king. Once in power kings acquire leverage of their own.

The most likely – but by no means certain – outcome of the election is a House of Commons in which the Conservatives have the most MPs, and the Liberal Democrats nowhere near as many as either them or Labour. Whatever Clegg said on Monday about it being "inexplicable" for a minority of popular votes to decide a government, this applies equally to him. British government is based not on popular votes but on the electoral college of parliament. That is the constitution. Those who want "every vote to count" should demand not proportional representation but a single national vote for a national leader, as in mainland Europe, with a separately elected assembly if they want one.

Clegg's moment of power will be ecstatic but brief. He will experience two immediate horrors. As he struggles to decide who should be prime minister he will find the only "non-negotiable" item in his locker is one that both big parties are bound to reject: any form of proportional representation that will put them always in this position after each election, with the Liberal Democrats as sole electoral college. Clegg might win a referendum promise or some vague alternative vote in each constituency. But Labour and Conservative politicians are not thick. They are unlikely to commit suicide.

The other handicap is more serious. From the moment Clegg does make a deal on whatever basis, he is chained to delivering on it. That means whipping his own party in support of one or other party that his MPs have just fought bitterly at a general election – and may have to fight again soon.

Throughout the 20th century, resulting splits were the curse of the Liberal party. Since the rise of Labour, the party represented no interest or coherent point of view, merely the disparate ambitions of its leaders and MPs at Westminster, starting with Lloyd George. Each Liberal MP tended to be beneficiary of some local "Clegg effect", but at Westminster the party depended on the patronage of the BBC, always giving it equal time to the other two parties while excluding the nationalists.

In good times Liberals have benefited from vagueness, being – as now – a perfect magnet for protest votes. It has been strong on the Celtic fringe, in Liverpool and Southwark, in Orpington and Sheffield Hallam, in suburbs and inner cities, rich and poor. But in bad times this diffuseness has been a weakness. It has kept Liberals out of national power in Britain for the best part of a century and denied it the disciplines required of government.

The party justifiably trumpets the strides it has made in local government. But predominant Con-Lib Dem coalition councils tend to be composed of like minds, and their decisions are largely managerial. When the Liberal Democrats were invited to form a coalition in Wales in May 2007, they immediately split left/right and disappeared into the wilderness.

If Clegg takes his party into a coalition with either Gordon Brown or David Cameron, his whips would be in disarray inside six months. Half his MPs regard Labour as anathema and the other half hate the Tories – largely depending on which party poses the biggest threat to individual MPs locally. Liberal Democrat spokesmen who are offered and take coalition office would be imprisoned by collective responsibility. They would either resign early or seek political asylum by crossing the floor.

This will be a tough parliament. Clegg will find himself having to defend coalition decisions weekly, to mostly enraged MPs probably facing an early return to the polls. The same would apply even under a looser, 1977-style convention of Commons support. It is hard enough for governments to whip their own MPs. Clegg's ability to deliver a united Liberal Democrat group to the party in power would be stretched to the limit. He would then be blamed for driving the country back to the polls.

Most centre parties either represent some territorial interest, as in Germany, or they merely garner protest votes. The Liberals failed in the 1960s to capitalise on their ancient loyalties on the Celtic fringe, being seduced by suburban success at Orpington. They failed to grasp the most obvious chance open to them, of replacing Labour as the natural party of the left, though with the Social Democrats in 1981-2 they came near to it. They have shilly-shallied with being centre-left, half-left, progressive, radical, localist, but never ramming any punch home.

The most likely beneficiary of a hung parliament will be not the Lib Dems but other minority groups who want something specific and deliverable, and can give disciplined support to a government. After the Liberal deal collapsed in 1978 it was the Ulster Unionists who won five extra seats from the dying Callaghan government. The Scots and Welsh won subsidy concessions.

The Liberal Democrats did brilliantly to induce the BBC to concede Clegg equal status with Brown and Cameron, though the bias is extraordinary when seen from Edinburgh, Cardiff or Belfast. But in the new parliament power may move to the nationalists and specific interest groups such as the Greens and Ukip. Added leverage will also be claimed by splinter groups inside whichever party takes power, the Labour left and Tory right. That is the message of Israel's entrenched hung parliaments.

Clegg will have his election-night glory and will deserve it. He has played a blinder. But amid the turbulent necessities of government, the political waters will soon close over his head. His best bet is to grab a good job from whichever leader offers it, and wave a cheery goodbye to the party of lost cause that he now leads. That is what Churchill did in like circumstances.