Nick Clegg: I spent months making the case for an EU budget cut

Deputy Prime Minister’s Questions is rarely an uplifting experience: more like watching some hapless chap stuck in a room full of his ex-girlfriends, all pointing angrily at him, like the wedding reception scene in Four Weddings and a Funeral. Somehow Peter Bone either manages to get his name on the Order Paper or to tag along at the end of another question to bring up one of the more painful rows in the Coalition relationship, the boundary reforms, or when he’s in a really good mood, what the DPM would do if David Cameron were run over by a bus. He did so again today, even though the Tories have already lost the boundaries vote. Zac Goldsmith was moodily grumbling, too, because the promised Recall Bill still wasn’t making its way onto the books.

Others were less kind. Toby Perkins asked whether there was any point left to the Deputy Prime Minister’s role, given the failure of many of Clegg’s flagship reforms.