By Peter Grenville

Published at 11:41, Friday, 28 September 2012

IT’S always a bit of a surprise to hear a politician admitting they got something wrong, and apologising.

Peter Grenville

I understand there have actually been more confirmed sightings of rocking-horse poo.

So when Deputy PM Nick Clegg did his earnest to-camera apology regarding tuition fees, you could have heard a penny drop.

Strangely, this apology seemed to be more about the fact the Lib Dems had stated they were going to do something, not the fact they hadn’t. Which is a bit like saying you aren’t apologising for forgetting to put the bins out, you’re just sorry you said you’d do it in the first place.

Still, Nick is sorry, and stared forlornly down the lens at us with big, sad, eyes, like the cat in Shrek.

Luckily, the wonderful world that is the internet was on hand to immortalise this awkward moment, capturing it forever with millions of YouTube viewings, where otherwise it would have been replaced in our consciousness by the next daft thing an MP did.

What could be more appropriate in the disposable-pop age of reality TV and X-Factor ‘talent’ contests than autotuning Cleggy, putting his speech to a catchy song, and flinging it back out into the webosphere?

Handily, website The Poke curates a fantastical world of idiocy, amusing human frailties, Epic Fails, Venn diagrams, flowcharts, and the obligatory amusing animals.

They brilliantly had this masterpiece of cringeworthiness online the next day, and it went viral rapidly, and was soon reported by all the major UK TV news channels, on radio and in print.

Spotting that the fragile tide of public ambivalence might be about to turn and drown him, His Cleggness hastily agreed it could be released as a single, as long as the money raised went to charity. Hey presto! Chart hit.

By the time you read this, it will probably already have started to fade from our collective consciousness, so rapid and mind-boggling is the rate at which something new grabs our miserably short attent... sorry, what was I saying?

What we could do with right about now is a posh politician to try and cycle the wrong way out of a gate at Downing Street, and then get uppity with a policeman.

Have a politically correct weekend.

Published by http://www.nwemail.co.uk