Nick Cohen’s cocksure forecast

Here’s what Nick Cohen wrote in The Observer last October:

“I would therefore be a little wary about believing the cocksure forecasts from clairvoyant commentators that ‘Ed Miliband will never be prime minister’ and remind you that prediction is the most dishonest form of journalism. The soothsayers have no idea who the next prime minister will be. What they mean is that in their opinion Ed Miliband should never be prime minister. But instead of arguing honestly with their readers, conservatives dress up their desires as prophecies and pretend that they can see the future.”

Yet here’s what Cohen writes this week on Politics Home and in the Spectator in an article headlined “Liberal England dies again”:

“To triple the tuition fees he and every Liberal Democrat pledged to cap and on occasion abolish has destroyed his [Nick Clegg's] credibility to an extent I still do not think the Westminster village understands…He’s finished …the two-party system is beginning to re-assert itself.”

Sounds rather like a cocksure forecast from a clairvoyant commentator to me.

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• Oscar Weird

  Cohen is the master of being all things to all liberals himself. He is yet another of these elitists who trades on being left wing. What was the other guy’s name? Ah, Blair, that’s the one.

• Guest

  Nick Cohen isn’t making the prediction that the two party system will, in the future, reassert itself.

  He’s saying that given the battering Clegg’s credibility has taken he senses that the reassertion has already begun.

  I wouldn’t bet against Milli E either, not out of respect for his prowess but for the fickle nature of the electorate.

  Here’s a prediction Ben: more and more journo-bloggers will pick pointless fights with other
  journo-bloggers thus allowing the humble reader to give his four pen’orth too.
  As has just occured.

• http://twitter.com/other_pete pete(rrr)

  What proportion of its manifesto would people expect a party with 14% of the MPs in a coalition govt to deliver?