The quotes emerging, in advance, from Nick Clegg’s Westminster Hour interview are a mix of the unsurprising and the intriguing. To the first category belongs his claim that “parties in
government tend to get a dip in their popularity” – I mean, he’s hardly going to say that the Lib Dems’ decline in the polls is a disaster, is he? But this, for instance, belongs firmly
in the second category:
In other words, the Lib Dems are better off in coalition – and they could well be better off in coalition with the Tories. As endorsements of the LibCon partnership go, it’s hard to imagine anything much stronger from Clegg. He seems to be suggesting that this is the best of all possible worlds for his party.“If we weren’t in a coalition now I don’t think people would take any notice of the Liberal Democrats …. If we were in a coalition with Labour, arguably our identity crisis would be even worse.”
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