Nick clegg

The government’s u-turn on sentencing reveals something quite important about the Lib Dems’ approach to coalition. Despite having backed Ken Clarke in private, they have stayed as far away as possible from the issue in public.   The Liberal Democrats were determined not to put themselves on the wrong side of the public on this issue, to end up copping the blame for ‘soft sentencing’. As one senior Liberal Democrat said to me recently, “we’re determined not to walk into any bear pits. If there is a big flashing neon sign above something saying ‘Tory trap’, we’ve got to be disciplined enough not to fall into it.”   Clegg’s circle

“First he denies his own policy, then he tries insults.” So said Ed Miliband of David Cameron’s performance in PMQs today. But I wonder what he’d say of the hundreds of Twitter users who went straight for the insults in a special Q&A with the Labour leader earlier. Urged on by Guido, plenty deployed the #AskEdM hash-tag to be rather unkind to MiliMinor. Here’s a selection of some of the crueller, funnier and less comradely tweets: @MTPT: If a train leaves Paddington at 1136, carrying 200 commuters, what time will the RMT bring it to a standstill? @FelicityParkes: Where did Ed Balls touch you? Show us on the doll. @MShapland:

Or so they will try to claim. For today is the day when Steve Field, the GP doing the listening part of the NHS listening exercise, will release his report into the government’s reforms. Judging from the convulsions of the grapvine, his recommendations will go something like this: more involvement for nurses and local officials, less private sector involvement and competitiveness, and a more relaxed timescale for introducing the changes. Although there are questions of degree hidden in that checklist, it is enough to have the Lib Dems heralding their “victory” for now. Paddy Ashdown was tapdancing across the airwaves yesterday, saying that Nick Clegg had “played a blinder”. “Am

Tory backbenchers have been whispering to the Times (£), and their words will not hearten Nick Clegg. If the coalition pushes for Lords reform, one says, then about 50 of them will rebel. “If you were listing priorities for the Tories, I’m not sure you would put this at the top,” another adds, “[it might be] bumped down by other priorities that come along.” Much hinges on how eager David Cameron is to confront this resistance, and hasten a policy that was more or less writ into his party’s manifesto. In the weeks following the AV referendum, the Tory leader has been happy for Clegg to act alone as the

The sun shone on the deputy prime minister at DPMQs earlier today. Nick Clegg usually wears a grimace at the despatch box; but he was assured this morning, successfully defending a Labour onslaught on the NHS reforms. There were even flashes of, well, Flashman. He replied to a question from Chris Bryant by quipping, “Every time the Honourable member asks a question, I wonder why anyone bugged his phone.” Clegg also rebuked John Hemming for breaking the Giggs super-injunction yesterday; a popular move among those MPs who think Hemming degraded parliamentary privilege. Clegg said: “I don’t think anyone should be above the rule of law. And if we don’t like

This evening, an event will occur that will make all the controversies and scandals of the last week seem somewhat irrelevant — at least according to American evangelical Harold Camping. He says that 6pm today is the time of the Rapture, as foretold in Thessalonians 4:17: all those “true believers” who accept Jesus Christ as their one true saviour will be taken up to heaven. For those of us left, we might wonder who will lead us through the “chaos and awful suffering” following both the loss of 40 per cent of the UK population and the earthquakes that will accompany it. Our Prime Minister — with his “sort of

What a curious speech by Nick Clegg to the CBI last night. Curious, not because it was bad — but because, in straining to give a uniquely “liberal” justification for deficit reduction and the spending cuts, the Deputy Prime Minister actually crafted an address that most Tory ministers should, and would, deliver themselves. Take his “liberal analysis” of the last decade: “On a liberal analysis, the last decade represented the worst of all worlds. On the one hand: unchecked private debt; an unsustainable housing market; an overleveraged banking sector; overreliance on City-based financial services while other regions and sectors suffered neglect. On the other: an inefficient state; central government wasting

The personal and the political. They mesh to readable effect in David Laws’ interview with the Times (£) this morning, his first since resigning from government last year. There are the observations about his personal life, about why he concealed his sexuality and the relief of having it out in the open. And there are the political ramifications that tumble on from that. We know that Laws came close to standing down as an MP when the scandal over his expenses first emerged, but here it is revealed that, “he would have quit as an MP last week had the commissioner rejected his explanation that his Commons claims were to

‘Constitutional reform is a waste of time, pure and simple. It never actually achieves its avowed end of reconnecting the voters with democratic institutions,’ wrote John McTernan, the former advisor to Tony Blair, recently. There are signs that the current government agrees.   Nick Clegg has unveiled the next stage of his constitutional reforms today by revealing draft plans to reform the House of Lords. The coalition speaks in unison in public: the Cabinet discussed reform last and apparently there was “very strong support for the proposals around the table”. But dissenting voices must have sounded in private.   The inestimable Rachel Sylvester reveals (£) that Clegg’s draft is very

This photograph adorns the homepage of the Labour Party’s website. It’s rather odd to show the PM and his deputy looking quite so soigné as the starting point for a critique. The New Statesman’s Dan Hodges descibes it as ‘insanity’.