OR, The Social Democrats: my part in their downfall. To his eternal credit, Nick Clegg doesn’t dodge a whit of blame in the matter of his party’s apparently failed relationship with the Tories. Nor does he indulge in spite or boo-hoo. Knowing full well that he has come out of the 2015 General Election breakdown with small public credit and a drastically reduced presence in the House of Commons, he straightens his face and looks forward.

Politics is a non-linear narrative of the Lib Dem/Conservative coalition. It is not in any sense an apology, not least because apologising was one of the things that got Clegg into trouble in the first place. His infamous reverse on tuition fees was one thing. Attempting to make public redress for it was quite another; Clegg’s statement was beatboxed and set to music and became an ironic favourite with the very students he had failed. There are other well-intentioned decisions that went equally awry. A doughty decision (if it really was his, and not Miriam’s) to keep wife and boys out of the public eye, in contrast to the Blairs’ and Camerons’ endless family tableaux, simply reinforced his reputation as a chilly loner.

For Clegg himself, these episodes are indicative of a long-term liberal failing to understand the iconography of power, or a principled resistance to such trappings. His laboriously chosen metaphor for contemporary politics is the zoetrope, through which a politician’s career is only seen in discrete flashes, which are then put together in the public mind. In his case, it starts with that stiff bromance in the Downing Street rose garden and then falls apart with the pictures of him holding a tuition fees pledge card. But what Clegg seems to forget is that a zoetrope is a machine dedicated to creating an illusion of movement, and an impression of vitality, when in fact there is none. Or maybe that’s exactly what he means.

On the iconography front, he recognises that something as simple as not having a recognisable front door against which he could make significant statements as deputy prime minister was a serious handicap. It led him into situations like the joint press conference with a senior Dutch politician conducted in front of a painting of the English and Dutch navies shooting seven bells out of one another. More seriously, finding himself and his party in government but with no experience or visceral instinct for the way of government proved to be a significant handicap.

He doesn’t quite have the humour to pose as a Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur’s Court, but he is determined to make his own negative experience show up the failings of an unrepresentative and now massively cumbersome polity whose actual authority is much reduced in a supranational world in which every tiny gesture, gaffe or fleeting inconsistency is picked up and retweeted in the blink of an eye. Clegg is obsessed with openness in government, or rather with the habit of secrecy that seemed ever more deeply ingrained on Cameron’s first watch. He takes few specific potshots at colleagues but seems to have a minor obsession with Michael Gove, who merits more references than anyone, including a demeaning episode when Gove, pictured left, avoids confrontation by hiding in a toilet. Gove exhibits a near paranoid suspicion of the civil service, which like all public bodies in the UK – the BBC, notoriously – suffers from a promotion culture that pushes nonentities rapidly up the hierarchy, leaving a vacuum between a grandiose top storey and a busy but essentially ineffectual basement. Gove’s an oddity, but he gets some things right.

CLEGG is ever anxious to point out that how the public sees a politician often says more about the job(s)he’s saddled with than the actual man or woman. He points to Boris Johnson, Ken Clarke, Charles Kennedy, all more complex and flawed than the outward show. He asks us to believe that George Osborne isn’t the pale-faced beancounter (his words) we saw under a succession of unconvincing hard hats, but a witty, mischievous fellow. And we’re expected to draw from this that the real Nick Clegg is a much solider fellow than we thought and his party a much more active and successful presence in the coalition than we were allowed to see.

His line – predictable enough – is that for five years the Lib Dems tempered the more savage aspects of austerity Toryism and secretive governance. As his subtitle suggests, his book is a candid restatement of classic liberal values. It includes a single citation of John Rawls (I always look for these, and call them Rawlplugs) but none at all, extraordinarily, of his own predecessor Jo Grimond. Grimond’s vision of British politics ranged between centre-left and centre-right coalitions with a tiny Tory country party at one extreme and a tiny Marxist Labour party at the other, and seems both relevant and almost fantastically distant now. Perhaps to someone of Clegg’s age, Grimond is as archaic as Gladstone.

He comes out of this as a decent, thoughtful fellow, genuinely committed to the middle way albeit with the chastened understanding that walking in the middle of the road generally means you will be run over. He went to Minnesota to study the Deep Green movement and found it intolerably dogmatic. He came back suspicious of ideology and convinced that politics is in need of thoughtful reform.

With this modest, careful book, he’s restored some personal credit and replaced the zoetrope flicker with a few more substantial images.