Clegg: Real REAL Change...Er...For Real

Extraordinary, baseless, dishonest and severely muddled.

When you've stopped laughing, spare a thought for those "fake", "phony" Conservatives who have been honest and brave enough to talk about the need to get public spending under control for nearly a year. Spare a thought for them, because they've been leading the debate, warning that government spending was unsustainable and that the UK was running a serious risk of defaulting. Clegg's record? Weak, dithering and confused.

Actually, it's never really been clear who is in charge of the Lib Dems since Labour's debt crisis began, Cable or Clegg. Now we know - it's Cable.

I suppose we can spare a thought for poor old Cleggy, though, too. I'm sure he does want "real" change (thanks to Barack Obama, David Cameron and just about everyone else for that line, eh Cleggy?), but how can his party offer such a thing when it is comprised of disaffected socialists, woolly-headed liberals and Lembit Opik? The answer, of course, is that it can't.

John Ward has said tonight that the Lib Dems should be targeting Labour voters, not Tory, in his own domain of Medway in Kent. I'm afraid I don't know much about the ins and outs of Kent politics, but he's absolutely dead right in a broader sense.

Clegg should choose one enemy and go after it. That enemy should be Labour and Brown, not Cameron and the Tories. His message from this little clip is bordering on unintelligible. The reason? No one knows what the Liberal Democrats are for. I certainly don't. And they don't either, otherwise they would have realised long ago that this is their big chance to become the official party of opposition to what will likely be a Conservative administration under a great deal of pressure. But they can't do that if they split the vote and help Brown/Labour.

The fact is, until the old, splittist, founding fathers (mothers?) of the SDP/Liberal/Alliance/Social and Liberal Democrats/Liberal Democrats are dead and buried, the tensions and contradictions that lie at the heart of this odd little party will persist.

So yes, spare a thought for Clegg. He has a very difficult job leading that mob.

Live Update
Clegg has just said "I held a sort of question and answer session at Glastonbury in a great big pink sort of tipi..."

He lost me there. Hopeless.