Right. One word used there lingers on the mind, though. It can be, can be viewed as inevitable. But should it? Now that’s the real question. Are broken promises really inevitable? Should they be viewed as such? Isn’t our trip to indulge in a plastic tray of impressively rancid meat soaked in neon-red glaze to do with the fact we’ve gotten drunk? And whose fault is that? Hmm. Breaking promises in politics can be viewed as inevitable, sure. You can dismiss the act as such. But if we pursue the idea a bit further – explore whether that should be the case and exactly what promises are being broken, are we still drawn to that conclusion?

"Yes," says Iain MacWhirter. As a political journalist for the Guardian, Sunday Herald, Scotsman and BBC over the last twenty years, and currently rector of Edinburgh University, he’s seen his fair share of politics and promises. "Circumstances change," he goes on. "Unforeseen developments and economic misfortune happen too. There’s no way you can hold politicians to the letter of their manifestos."

It seems a measured point. Can we really expect every word of manifestos, often stretching over a thousand in length, to be followed without fault? Is that possible with a democratic system that requires parliamentary support for legislation to pass? Perhaps not. And then there’s time, or the lack of it, as former EUSA president Adam Ramsay suggests. Despite being elected on a student vote, he explains that politics – even at the student level – is not always all about meeting election pledges. "Particularly in EUSA and student politics . . . you don’t know how much time other things can take up. I spent a lot of my time dealing with internal stuff. I think a lot of people might run in student politics, and make all sorts of promises, and not realise the amount of things that can just come up."

"If [politicians] make promises, then obviously they should try to keep them. I’m not saying that’s not important. But you can’t draw a list of every single thing with tick boxes and see how many they do, because often in the duration of a parliament it’s more complicated than that." Fair enough. But to return, now, to the most striking recent example of a party failing to register green ticks on the check list – Nick Clegg’s Liberal Democrats. At their mention, Ramsay wants to make quite clear one distinction."I’m not saying it’s OK for the Lib Dems to say they’ll get rid of fees, and then not, because that was clearly a priority of a lot of their voters - that’s different from a little detail in a manifesto. But they’re implying the former is the latter."

Ah, now we’re getting somewhere. Given Clegg and his party’s decision to abandon key election promises – the scrapping of tuition fees being the big one – many supporters and sympathisers feel the Lib Dems have moved beyond the acceptable level of excuses of compromise or bureaucratic barriers in doing a coalition deal with the Conservative Party. Is this, then, where broken promises hurt? "With the Lib Dems, its not so much little individual things," explains Ramsay. "But what they have done is implied they’re going to go one way, and sort of gone in the other direction. I think that’s the significant thing. They’re implying because they’re in a coalition, it’s OK."

This is a point MacWhirter agrees with. "You know, the Liberal Democrats are quite right to say that in the course of negotiations, for the coalition, there has to be flexibility. But on certain issues there have to be red lines." He points out that the party has traditionally stuck to its principles. For example, the Scottish Liberal Democrats, in the aftermath of the 2007 Holyrood election, refused to enter negotiations to form a coalition deal with the minority governing SNP unless the nationalists dropped their commitment to a referendum on independence. "So – how can they turn round and say . . ." he tails off. "I mean - they had their red lines. The UK Liberal Democrats have no red lines at all. In fact, on several very important issues, the Liberal Democrats have not only fudged their commitment, but they’ve actually, well, they’ve reversed them."

The list itself is extensive: their desire to delay deep cuts quickly appears to have been compromised; housing benefit was meant to be protected and is now under threat from government cuts; child benefit is in a similar situation; while their opposition to the trident nuclear system also seems to have been shelved for now as the government pushes for an albeit delayed replacement. And then, of course, there is the National Union for Students (NUS) tuition fees pledge. "I can’t think of a case in history, in modern politics, when such a firm commitment has been broken so quickly," says MacWhirter. "They very publically signed an NUS pledge on it, and then have reneged on it within a matter of a month or two of the election. I think that’s just not acceptable."

Here, it seems, lies the heart of the idea of ‘the broken promise’ in politics. When we are talking efficiency savings that are not met, or administrative changes never realised, or small things never done because of uncovered rules or obscure laws, people accept that these things happen. And while a succession of such failures could undermine confidence, these issues alone will never bring down a government. It probably is inevitable that some promises are broken in politics. But what we are talking about here with the Liberal Democrats, I would suggest, are significant promises. Maybe more than promises. And these are far from the "inevitably will be broken" category.

We’re talking not about a carbon emissions target that now can’t be met. We’re talking about the sole motivation behind that student putting a cross next to the Lib Dem candidate. We’re talking about the very reason for that single mum, or dad, to put their faith in Nick Clegg and his ideas. We’re talking about why that young woman, in need of her own home, had the conviction to eschew the fallacy of a straight choice between Labour and the Conservatives. When put like that, the implications of what is ultimately a betrayal of trust begin to become clear. These are not merely broken promises, but examples of those who invested their faith and democratic right in the genuinely different policies the Liberal Democrats offered. They have been dismissed, even exploited.

MacWhirter might agree breaking promises is inevitable, but he also believes "there are certain promises that cannot be broken, and a party is fixed to them to retain any shred of credibility." He’s right; these aren’t just ‘inevitabilities.’ These are booze-fuelled kebabs on a night out, with chips on the side and a bottle of Buckfast to go. These are choices brought on by your own actions, your own decisions. Inevitable? There is nothing inevitable about losing your principles - that’s down to you. Ultimately, these are the policies that have suffered in the coalition deal: the ones that defined the party’s campaign and drove people to cast their ballots in the Lib Dems’ favour. Will it go down well? Forgive me for being sceptical.

What will be the electoral impact, for example in Scotland, of a pact with the Tories? Parliamentary elections loom in seven months time, and the party is currently polling at only two points above the Greens. And, as MacWhirter points out, in Scotland there is no easy path to recovery – or, dare I say it, redemption? He says that "the problem for the Liberal Democrats is they’re now inextricably bolted onto the Tories and they are committed to the toughest spending cuts in modern history, and the Scottish Tories have sunk below the horizon of political recognition. There’s still tremendous apathy towards the Conservatives in Scotland. It’s one of the most enduring, immovable features of Scottish politics. I can’t see any way the Lib Dems are going to recover in time for the Scottish elections."

"I think they’ve created huge antagonism amongst their supporters in Scotland, many of whom voted Lib Dem rather than Labour because they thought the Liberal Democrats were more suited to these kinds of policies. And now they’ve gone into coalition with a Tory government. I mean this is really toxic politics." A toxic politics that will not govern in Scotland, perhaps, but politics that still fills the seats around the UK cabinet table. It will be interesting to see if the scars of exploitation and betrayal inflicted upon individual voters will have time to heal for 2015.

"Better a broken promise than none at all." Eh Nick? I admit, you’d definitely be forgiven for thinking the Liberal Democrat leader is the author of that little phrase after all. But it’s Mark Twain, the American humourist. Sadly, it looks like this five year long joke is on us.