Nick Clegg gave a rather sombre speech to the CentreForum summer reception last night. Addressing the guests from a pulpit in the vaulted cloisters of Westminster Abbey, as the rain poured down outside, the Deputy Prime Minister admitted he felt ‘lobotomised’ in government. It was actually a clumsy attempt to praise the work of the Lib Dem-aligned think tank in helping the party retain its brain by dreaming up new policies when the constraints of Coalition might otherwise prevent it, but it did not go down well with those listening. Andrew Neil tweeted that Lord Steel, who he was standing next to at the event, had rolled his eyes at Clegg’s turn of phrase.
Clegg also used some of his speech to attack the eurosceptic beast that his Coalition partners are currently feeding. While David Cameron dangled the prospect of a ‘fresh deal and a fresh settlement’ on Britain’s EU membership in front of Tory MPs hungry for a referendum when he spoke in the Commons yesterday, the Deputy Prime Minister said his worst nightmare was a ‘shrivelled, inward-looking’ England outside the EU and separated from Scotland by a ‘yes’ vote in the independence referendum. The rain was drumming down particularly hard at this point in his speech. The cloisters grew quite gloomy.Fortunately, Clegg gave his Lib Dem colleagues who had turned up all the reassurance they could possibly need for the future. His party is ‘going to bounce back in a way that will confound all of the pessimists’, apparently. Hopefully the person in charge of that bounce from the party’s current 9% support in the polls hasn’t also had a lobotomy.
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