He sees off trick questions as toothpaste deals with plaque


Nick Clegg: Lib Dem voters blame him for misleading them

Nick Clegg: Lib Dem voters blame him for misleading them

Nick Clegg, the Alpine skier, was good enough to look in on the Commons. He withstood 25 minutes of Questions to the Deputy Prime Minister.

His bearing was not unlike that of a winter sports enthusiast riding a slow chairlift in a blizzard.

You know the drill: sit as motionless as possible, keep your chin down and try not to expose too much cheek to the elements.

Then, once the ordeal is over, make all haste for the nearest gluhwein outlet.

Poor Cleggy. Everyone is being beastly about him.

For years the Lib Dems bored the Y-fronts off the nation by droning about coalition government.

The chance for power-sharing finally arose last May. Mr Clegg, their generalissimo, seized destiny. He said he was doing it in the national interest and he may well have been right, though the personal title of Deputy PM was obviously jolly welcome. Now Lib Dem voters blame him for misleading them.

They say he has marched the party off the cliff.

The media has been beating up Mr Clegg for looking wan and for slipping off to the slopes last week for a rare family break, just when he was ‘supposed’ (supposed by the media, that is) to be running the country.

He was teased about this holiday yesterday by Labour’s Kelvin Hopkins (Luton N). Kelvin! He is normally the most mild-mannered of inquisitors. This was like watching a man being savaged by a garden mole.

A more confident politician might have laughed off the ribaldry but Mr Clegg failed to see the funny side.

He said that he had only taken off two days from work and claimed to have returned to London the moment it became clear his services were required here.

It was ridiculous, he argued, to think that David Cameron ceased to act as PM just because he was abroad.

Did football managers cease to wield power when they travelled overseas for away matches?

The House was not full. Mr Clegg, though a punchbag, is not box office. He was watched without rapture by Tory backbenchers, yet one or two of them did ask helpful (planted) questions. Labour MPs looked on with glee. Chris Bryant (Rhondda) was laughing so much at Mr Clegg that he had to wipe tears from his eyes.

Some eight Lib Dem backbenchers were on parade. Simon Hughes (Bermondsey) leafed through an ostentatiously large pile of paperwork.

Mr Hughes is to Lib Demmery what Ayatollah Khomeini was to Tehran in the 1970s. Up to a point, anyway.

Mr Hughes, unlike the late Mr Khomeini, is clean-shaven and not much of a chap for turbans in public (though one can perhaps imagine him wearing a Madame Arcati job at home of an evening). But I hope you gather what I am trying to say.

Mr Hughes thinks himself a leader in exile. He chose not to say anything during yesterday’s short session – only one Lib Dem did – yet he smouldered like a wet bonfire. Mr Clegg was not entirely alone.

By him on the front bench sat his under-minister Mark Harper, a youthful Conservative about whom there is something faintly antiseptic, as in a dental hygienist.

Mr Harper sees off tricky questions as efficiently as Signal toothpaste deals with plaque. He performed spotlessly.

Also on the Government bench alongside Mr Clegg sat his fellow Lib Dem ministers Chris Huhne, hairy David Heath and Danny Alexander.

Norman Lamb, a Lib Dem MP who acts as Mr Clegg’s aide-de-camp, sat behind him.

But that was about it. You would not, at present, need much of an RNLI dinghy to rescue the Cleggites.

On previous appearances at the despatch box, Mr Clegg had betrayed a certain testiness.

Yesterday he controlled his temper. It was not exciting to watch but he survived, so much so that by the end he left the Chamber with a skip in his heel, his arm round the left shoulder of Bath’s Don Foster.

Time for that gluhwein!

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