Clegg speaks to the hall

Nick Clegg chose to speak to his party not the country today. His address was a justification of his decision to go into government with the Tories and a plea for his party to stick together over the next five, difficult years.
 
The crucial bit of the speech came when Clegg said of his party ‘maybe we got used to [being against every government that came along] ourselves’ but ‘imagine if we had turned away. How could we ever again have asked the voters to take us seriously?’ Clegg’s point was that opposition was not an option and ‘this country could not have borne five more years of Labour’. So, coalition with the Tories was the only option.
 
We also saw in Clegg’s speech the coalition’s first attempt to justify its deficit reduction programme now that the prospects of a soverign debt crisis has receded, now that the crisis is—as Clegg put it — ‘invisible’.