Because the main focus of people's contempt has switched recently from Fleet Street to Westminster, newspapers may have started to forget how detested they are. But rightwing editors may quickly be reminded of it if they overdo their "get Clegg" campaign. In fact, they may have overdone it already. As it did regularly during its exposure of the MPs' expenses scandal, the Daily Telegraph used a front-page headline as big as the New York Times had on the day after 9/11 to reveal that some Liberal Democrat donors had been paying money directly into Nick Clegg's bank account, apparently so he could pay a researcher. Since Clegg says he declared these payments, it is difficult to see what the scandal is about.
The Daily Mail's front page screamed "Clegg in Nazi Slur on Britain", referring to an article he wrote for the Guardian in 2002 about Britain's continuing obsession with its glorious role in the second world war. "All nations have a cross to bear, and none more than Germany with its memories of Nazism," he had written. "But the British cross is more insidious still. A misplaced sense of superiority, sustained by delusions of grandeur and a tenacious obsession with the last war, is much harder to shake off." This has been for decades a familiar analysis of a British problem, but the Mail calls it a "Nazi slur" (meaning what, exactly? That Britain is Nazi, or that it has been slurred by a Nazi?) and seems to be hoping that its readers believe "more insidious" means "worse".
"The Liberal leader's words couldn't be more insulting to the memory of those who lost their lives in the second world war or insensitive to their relatives," the Mail wrote in a leading article – despite the fact that there was obviously no such insult or insensitivity involved. "It's perhaps unfair to point out that Mr Clegg's father is half-Russian, his mother is Dutch, and he's married to a Spaniard," it went on. Yes, indeed; very unfair, but useful for the purpose of persuading voters that Clegg cannot possibly be a British patriot. I find it difficult not to agree with Lord Mandelson, who described these smears on Clegg as "cheap", "squalid" and "disgusting".
I write before last night's second television debate between the three main party leaders, but it seems to me that Clegg will enter it much bolstered by these ludicrously overblown attacks. In the first debate he did well with an electorate yearning for somebody fresh and new. Now his credentials as a candidate of change have been further strengthened.
These are symptoms of the belief held by some newspapers that they have the right and the power to determine who wins elections. A recent advertisement for the Independent reading "Rupert Murdoch won't decide this election, you will" so inflamed News International that its top executives, James Murdoch and Rebekah Brooks, allegedly stormed round unannounced to the Independent's offices to give its chief executive, Simon Kelner, a piece of their minds. Who knows what will happen in the election; but even if it were not the best outcome for the country as a whole, a Lib Dem triumph would at least put these arrogant newspapers in their place.
• More Guardian election comment from Cif at the polls
The rubbish mountain
Needless to say, I have never been up Mount Everest. But I have always imagined it to be an unsullied sort of place. I am quite wrong, however. It is, on the contrary, the world's highest garbage dump. I should have guessed that, because climbers have been going up and down it in multitudes – 4,000 of them since Sir Edmund Hillary's conquest of the mountain in 1953 – and the urge to discard one's rubbish in that remote place must be even greater than to throw one's Mars bar wrapper out of the window on the M1.
Previous efforts to clean up the mountain have stopped below what is known as the "death zone", the area above 8,000 metres (about 26,000ft) in which lack of oxygen and hazardous conditions have presented climbers with the greatest risks. Up there can be found not only discarded oxygen bottles, gas canisters, ropes, tents and so on but also the dead bodies of a few climbers. Now, 20 Nepalese climbers are setting off to attempt this most risky of litter collections. They are doing it because rubbish previously submerged under snow has been brought to the surface by global warming and is creating difficulties for today's climbers, who are an important source of income for Nepal. You need a financial incentive to protect nature, something that's unfortunately lacking in Bill Bryson's admirable but failing campaign against litter in the English countryside.
Flying the flag for freedom
It is a sign of a free country that you are allowed to desecrate its flag. In Britain, you can do what you want to the Union flag, but burning the national flag in Turkey can land you in prison for three years. A photograph published the other day in a French newspaper shows a man apparently wiping his bottom with the tricolour. A justice ministry spokesman said: "Presumably the law has the legal means to punish such an intolerable act." You'd think the justice ministry might know. Actually it hasn't. It's only an offence in France to desecrate a flag at an official ceremony; you can do what you like with a private flag. France is freer than it knows.
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