In the beginning God said – Let there be Lib Dems

The world would look quite different today if a Lib Dem had been its creator

Nicholas Lezard
Monday 26 August 2013 13:49 EDT
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Nick Clegg at work
Nick Clegg at work (Getty Images)

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Steve Webb, the Lib Dem MP for Thornbury and Yate in Gloucestershire and the Pensions Minister in the Coalition, has claimed that God is a Liberal Democrat. “There is no other conclusion that can be drawn from a reading of the New Testament.” And of the Old Testament, too.

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God dithered about for ages.

And God said, let there be light: and there was not exactly light, but a kind of murky compromise between light and darkness. But the darkness was still pretty dark.

And God set up a committee to name the sort-of light and the darkness, with a brief to make its report and recommendations within the lifetime of the current parliament. Which the Tories weren’t going to listen to anyway.

And God said, let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters. And God sort of made the firmament, but it was rather wobbly and leaky, and bits of the earth and the heavens and the waters kept sloshing about together in a way which made no one very happy at all.

And God said, let the Earth, or whatever it is, bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind.

And it was not so.

And God said, let there be lights in the firmament to divide the day from the night, and to give light upon the earth. And lo, no one knoweth to this day where those lights have got to.

And God said, let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life, and fowl that may fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven.

And God created whales, which were about the size of thy thumb, and a kind of orangey parrot with a silly tail which he did put on the cover of His manifesto, that people might know which promises He would break later.

And God said, be fruitful and multiply, and after three years there was 0.6 per cent growth after a rather long period of contraction in the economy. And God said that it was good, which art a funny use of the word “good”, whichever way thou lookest at it.

And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and thou really dost not want to know what kind of a gruesome cock-up He made of that one, thou really dost not.

And at the end of days, when the fixed-term creation had come to an end, God was cast into the outer darkness, for the people were sore oppressed by the bleating sound of His voice, and the way He lent Himself to parodies on ThouTube.

And the electorate did say, Serve thee right, thou creeping spineless power-hungry turncoat, thou.

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