Fancy that – being accused of hypocrisy by Harriet Harman

Those eagerly rushing to put the boot into Nick Clegg would be well advised to put their own houses in order
    • The Observer,
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Is Nick Clegg a hypocrite? Or worse, as his loudest accuser, the widely quoted Labour MP John Mann has it, a "total hypocrite", for deploring the use of interns when, three decades ago, the member for Sheffield Hallam benefited from an identical leg-up? Mann, who represents the nearby constituency of Bassetlaw, explains: "It is total hypocrisy and really desperate for him to attack internships now. His policies are holding down social mobility in this country but he enjoyed all the advantages of family connections himself." So? Should Clegg be disqualified by his personal advantages ever from addressing social mobility? Or is there some way he might atone for the offence of early privilege, possibly through a formal denunciation of his parents or an act of self-flagellation in Parliament Square? It has occasionally been done. After choosing to embrace poverty and to call everything sister or brother, the total hypocrite St Francis of Assisi was not just forgiven his advantageous start in life, but actively venerated for ground-breaking work on social mobility.

But if there is a consequence to Clegg's newly exposed iniquity, Brother Mann appears to be saving it for a later discussion on the pros and cons of sister internship. For him, one question suffices. Nick Clegg: jammy hypocritical bastard or just a more than usually compromised politician from a privileged background?

As always, these days, you wonder what Joanna Lumley would say. And Honor Blackman. Or, in the event of these actresses being unavailable, their colleague, Colin Firth. It is regrettable, given their decisive role in the AV debate, that we cannot call on these and other celebrities as and when comparably knotty issues come our way. But perhaps we can make some guesses. Remembering Tony Blair's terrifying assertion that "I only know what I believe", the wise Joanna Lumley might well think that occasional trimming is preferable, in politics, to ostentatious sincerity. Then again, looking at Colin Firth's noble alter egos, Mr Darcy and George VI, and the nice one in Bridget Jones, you sense his disappointment when a man parts company with his honour.

Turning, reluctantly, to academe, we find the late Judith Shklar, an authority on hypocrisy, wryly identifying it in her book Ordinary Vices, as "the only unforgivable sin, perhaps especially among those who can overlook and explain away almost every other vice, even cruelty". For a while, last week, neither the dismantling of the NHS nor Britain's chaotic intervention in Libya could compete with the discovery that Clegg was up to his neck in an act that Shklar might have filed in a category she named, in a brilliant taxonomy of hypocrisy, as "insincerity and inauthenticity". Attacking unfair advantage, Clegg carelessly failed to add an internship to a list of his own, unfair advantages already known to include wealth, Westminster and Cambridge. Such attitudes, Shklar notes, "need not express themselves in conduct that injures others directly, but they are said to deform one's personality".

In practice, to judge by his recent public outings, in the Commons and in the pages of the New Statesman, as the object of Jemima Khan's tender condescension, hypocrisy could be the single personal attribute the nervily floundering Clegg shares with more successful statesmen. Actually, his plaintive comments about the ugly realities of power suggest that he is not even very skilled at it, unless a simulated uneasiness with compromise is just further evidence of his duplicity. Even if Clegg will, as urged by his enemies, be remembered as one of history's most egregious and disgusting hypocrites, right up there with Senator Larry Craig, the homosexual hammer of homosexuality, his individual vice is possibly less harmful to his country than entrenched social immobility.

But hypocrisy is so much easier to go after. "When political actors disagree about right and wrong and everything else," Shklar argued, "they can only undermine each other with the revelation that their opponent is not living up to his own professed ideal." Liberals, she wrote prophetically, "are particularly liable to be charged with it, because they are given to compromise". Once they scented liberal hypocrisy, no one, including indignant Lib Dem interns, could be expected to decide whether unpaid internships are, as Clegg now argues, so unfair on poorer candidates that they should not exist or, with all their faults, a worthwhile experience for such graduates as can afford them.

As with AV, only even more tedious, there appears to be no compelling argument either way. Indeed, somewhere on his MP's website, Clegg's principal persecutor, John Mann, discloses that, in addition to the publicly funded services of his wife, his commitment to social mobility in the Sheffield/Bassetlaw area has, like Clegg's, extended to the use of unsalaried staff: "I have also paid expenses/fees to several students and interns usually costing under £1,000 in total and never above £2,000 in total."

With luck, enemies of hypocrisy will be too preoccupied with the Lib Dems' exploitation of graduates to note that, prior to internships being redesignated a scandalous affront to fairness, they were Labour policy, as well as practice. Do the words "Parent Motivators" ring any bells with Harriet Harman, last seen teasing Clegg about Tory auctions of "City internships for the children of the highest bidder" and with Hazel Blears, who asked him to agree that "unpaid internships are exploitative and totally unacceptable in this day and age"?

Published by Lord Mandelson's department in 2009, the eponymous pamphlet introduced us to, among others, unemployed "Charlotte, 22", from Surrey, with a degree in media studies. You might conclude that Charlotte made a big mistake studying for this useless qualification, but not so: "Charlotte's father happened to mention Charlotte's situation to a fellow colleague, who noted that his wife was currently working in PR and suggested Charlotte should send her CV to her." Can you guess how it ends? "As a result, Charlotte had a successful interview and managed to get a two-week work experience placement which led on to a three-month graduate placement, and subsequently a full-time career in PR. One year on and she hasn't looked back."

And the lesson? "You can help your son/daughter in this by talking to your friends and colleagues and keeping them up to date about your child's search for work for her dream job." Assuming you've got colleagues. And a child who'll work for nothing. "Even unpaid internships can be extremely valuable," urge Labour's career advisers. Or they did until last week, when Clegg's exposure prodded Hazel's morals into a state of wakefulness. The hypocrisy would be quite striking if, following her house-flipping and Harriet's shameless school-wangling, you didn't already know these MPs, like the hypocrite Miliband (cuts) and the hypocrite Balls (banks), to be the standard, compromised issue. Where, in the end, does the endless cycle of unmaskings get you, if it's not a collection of unyielding, uncompromising loners? "Anti-hypocrisy is a splendid weapon of psychic warfare," wrote Judith Shklar, "but not a principle of government."

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