This comment from Nick Clegg – speaking to the Evening Standard today – deserves pasting into the political scrapbook:
“Let me be absolutely clear once and for all. The Liberal Democrats will fight the next election as we did the last – as an independent political party in every constituency in the country.”
Which is considerably less equivocal than David Cameron and George Osborne have managed recently. When the Tory pair were pressed on the matter towards the end of last month, they said only that they “expect” the coalition parties to fight independently of each other come election time.
Not that the Clegg quotation rules out electoral chicanery altogether. It still leaves room, say, for the Tories to pull their candidates out of Lib-Lab marginals. And that’s assuming that the coalition sticks by it in the first place. Watch this space, so to speak.
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