“Did you wake up with Nick Clegg last Sunday morning?” Alas, gentle readers, there’s a question that hasn’t been asked at this great university since the mid-eighties, when our very Deputy Prime Minister himself graced these hallowed courts (well, Robinson anyway). But - just in case you missed it - last Sunday joyously gave us cause to resurrect that most hideous of enquires: to wit, auntie Beeb paraded Saint Nicholas on its flagship weekend wireless broadcast, Desert Island Discs.

For a programme that usually comes as a blessed relief to intellectually ravaged Radio 4 listeners - music is played - this Sunday’s episode was remarkable in that it saw everyone’s favourite Cleggy hit a terrible new low: with every utterance he made, he revealed that he’s here to stay. Yes, much like Anne Widdecombe’s dancing shoes, we can be sure all is good and broken-in now. There’s no going back.

Those who predicted a quick collapse of the coalition have been thwarted, and the ‘I agree with Nick!’ brigade can merrily up and down Whitehall in their perpetual purple rain dance for proportional representation. So just how did Nick reveal he’s become such an irreplaceable part of our national furniture? By giving himself a good polish, of course. With terrible inevitability, the airwaves were positively dripping with the glutinous bleach of self-promotion: Nick gleamed like Cillit Bang, every song and every word a populist appeal to universal coolness.

Sometimes subtly - but mostly quite blatantly – he reminded us of those heady days when the political fate of this sceptered isle lay solely in his hands, and with those included on his BlackBerry contact list. And then naughty Nick really let the colourful cat of controversy out of the bottomless bag of publicity: he’s a secret smoker. Oh Nick! Stop it, you! You’re really one of the lads, aren’t ya? Yet however far Nicotine Nick manages to crawl up the nose of the nation (watch this space…), his appearance on Sunday was actually of special import: it was the last movement in the bizarre politico-liturgical dance of his coronation, the final rite of passage.

Like begging your teenage children to give up the wacky-baccy lest the story should leak, an appearance on Desert Island Discs now comes as standard in the accession process to gaining any big seat at the cabinet table, Remember Gordo, declaring his love for the Arctic Monkeys, remember Call-Me-Dave loving The Killers: the programme’s a never ending exercise in self-promotion.

And this says something about our collective political consciousness: our politicians can’t be considered truly in office until they’ve ingratiated themselves as pseudo-celebrities with the middle class listenership of BBC speech radio (cf. recent episodes of a prime-time dance show to see how politicians can’t be considered truly out of office until they’ve ingratiated themselves with the remainder of the Beeb’s audience by balancing on a trapeze). But far from making me want to write angry letters to Broadcasting House complaining that the show has become nothing but a sad indictment of our lame political culture which always puts populism over honesty, Nick’s appearance actually saw the format at its most metaphorically accomplished.

Because if Nick really was standing on the shore of that fabled desert island, puffing his way through an endless carton of Marlboro Reds, the resultant smoke signals would be much too thin to be made out by the crew of any passing rescue boat. And then life really would be Easy Like Sunday Morning.