Clog against Clegg

It all started on a really small scale, just 21 Bristol students wanting to do something special to demonstrate our contempt for Nick Clegg.

Lucy had the idea of a protest dance, and remembering what my grandfather had taught me, I suggested a clog dance, an anti-Clegg clog dance.

My granddad used to be a clog-maker, a carpenter who specialised in all things clog. We only had five days before the protest, so I went round to see him the next day. He was delighted at my idea, it seems that granddads hate Clegg too. He took me to his workshop (the shed in his garden) and showed me how to work the wood and make a clog to protest standard.

He made the first pair as an example, showing me how to measure, cut and plane. The key skill is the measuring, you must get the clog exactly the right size for the foot it's going on, and it must be the same size and weight as its partner.

I spent the next two days in his workshop, skipping lectures and missing a tutorial. I enjoyed the work, my hands working the wood, so much more real that writing abstract ideas into essay form, I could feel the wood, smell it, even taste the wood-chip in the air. When I eventually finished I had 21 mostly-matching pairs of clogs, and I felt wrongly proud of my clunky, wooden creations.

The protest went well and we all thought that would be the end of it, but the local TV news picked up the story of the Clogs against Clegg protest. The whole thing went viral and within hours I was getting emails from student groups all over the country wanting some of our anti-Clegg clogs.

Demand was so great I could never have managed it myself, so I trained up my fellow protestors and all over Bristol sheds were acquisitioned on the anti-Clegg mission.

My granddad's workshop became a hub for the business, a central point for taking orders and mailing out protest clogs all over the country. It took over all our lives for the next few months. We were no longer students, we'd become full-time clog-makers. My granddad was overjoyed to see a traditional business rejuvenated by his granson.

We thought it had reached its peak with the 150,000 student Clogs On: Clegg Out protest outside the Lib Dem party conference, but in fact that was just the beginning.

By that September Clegg's cuts were really starting to hit and millions of people were losing their jobs. Unemployed teachers, nurses, firemen, dancers, professional clowns, unprofessional clowns, doctors, giraffe handlers, social workers, milkmen and giraffe handlers' apprentices all joined the Clogs Against Clegg protest. The only trades that weren't involved were bankers, senior management and politicians. Even children took part in the protest, when they realised that Clegg was making them do extra homework and had cancelled playtime.

We had to go industrial to meet the demand. Tiffany's dad helped us to take over a factory that had been making ornamental wooden owls for Bill Oddie World. Soon the whole country was clog dancing. There was even Cleggs Against Clegg, nearly every person with that name wanted to disassociate themselves from the DPM. Indeed, so hated was Nick Clegg by this time that his own family bought clogs from us, even the family dog was wearing protest clogs. Only Clegg's pet goldfish stood by him.

Cameron's decision to send Clegg abroad as a roving ambassador had seemed like a good way of getting him out of the public view, but it just made our movement global. All over the world people saw the smug, insincere, arrogant tosser, took and instant dislike to him and started clog-dancing in protest.

In order to meet the demand, as well as reducing costs, we shipped the work to China. This coincided with Clegg's visit to China, which led to our biggest ever surge in demand. Within days we were being sent millions of clogs from China and were sending them all straight back again, with our trademark protest sticker added.

Of course, as you'll know from your pub conversations, when 1 billion Chinese people all clog-dance simultaneously the very seas of the world are shaken up like cocktails in a Tom Cruise movie, turfing mermaids onto the shores and causing great, raging tidal waves and floods. Nick Clegg was spending a month hiding away from voters in a Swedish Archipelago and was swept out to sea, never to be seen again. Reports say that his goldfish was washed away with him.

This leaves me in a difficult position. Clogs Against Clegg has become the third biggest industry in Britain, with worldwide trading contracts and massive brand-awareness and loyalty. But with Clegg gone, my business is on a knife edge.

I have a billion clogs left unsold. I need to find a smug, arrogant, snobbish, English leader to protest against, preferably one who's name begins with 'C', maybe someone who believes himself so important he could bring down the government single-handed, when in reality he is barely capable of boiling an egg.

I'd welcome suggestions.