With his political star already clearly fading, British Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg saw another defeat today when his much publicized effort to end the practice of “control orders,” the British term for house arrest without charges, has been a failure.

This comes less than a week after his party was touting the secret “compromise” deal as a big win, but now reports say that the program will remain essentially unchanged, except that they will stop calling them “control orders” and then will call them something else.

At best, officials say, it is possible that the detainees may get the legal right to know the “gist” of the reason for their detention. Though it does not appear that they will be able to challenge their detention on that basis, it does make the program at least marginally less kafkaesque.

Clegg, who campaigned on the importance of abolishing the program, is now defending the program, saying that the government simply can’t get some of the people they want to detain into court and that it is therefore “inescapable” that te program must continue.

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