Clegg defines his liberalism

I do feel for Nick Clegg. He’s taken an oppositionalist party into government, and they hate it. He is politically and psychologically prepared for what goes with power; grassroots LibDems less so. And this brings problems. Yesterday, he was complaining that his party is “too male and too pale”; but his main problem is that there are too few of any. At the peak of Cleggmania, the Lib Dem had 30 per cent of the the vote. Now it’s 10 per cent in the polls. If things continue at this rate, he won’t need a ‘ring of steel’ for his next conference: a phone box will suffice. So, what can he do? His speech tries to define a new word: ‘liberal’. He has this to say:

‘For the left, an obsession with the state. For the right, a worship of the market. But as liberals, we place our faith in people.