Clegg’s no Dave

Nick Clegg faced a stormy Q&A session this afternoon and he isn’t in David Cameron’s league as a performer. He struggled through tough questions on VAT, DfID, a transaction tax, AV and the appointment of Philip Green. His answers were garbled, though he did stick to the government’s script. There was, however, one particularly damaging exchange. Clegg was heckled by a man who thought the coalition ‘lacked a mandate for its rather brutal social policies’, and added that Clegg should get out of the coalition before it was ‘too late.’ Clegg’s response was limply pugilistic.

‘You’ve obviously got an axe to grind.” He went onto say “it’s not in my gift, and it shouldn’t be of course, any individual’s gift – not even yours, you seem very sure of yourself on these things – how people vote.  Now you whether you like it or not and you clearly don’t like it what happened was that no single party got a majority.