Nick Clegg reveals his biggest coalition regret (and it isn’t tuition fees)

It’s fair to say that during Nick Clegg’s time in the coalition, the former deputy Prime Minister appeared to make a number of catastrophic mistakes when it came to the wellbeing of his party. However, when asked in an interview on Newsnight what he would list as his biggest regret, the former deputy Prime Minister chose not to dwell on policy blunders such as the Liberal Democrat’s disastrous tuition fees U-turn. Instead Clegg said his ‘biggest mistake’ was sitting next to David Cameron at PMQs:

‘I think maybe my biggest mistake was sitting where I did at PMQs and maybe I should have sat somewhere else.’

Clegg says that his seat of choice next to the Prime Minister made him and his party look like mere ‘passengers’ in a Tory government:

‘I think in many respects the optics of politics made it all but impossible for people to understand what Liberal Democrats did in the opposition. Sitting mute next to David Cameron at Prime Minister’s Questions every week was a sort of terrible kind of encapsulation of what are critics said about us which is somehow that we were passengers in a government, when in fact we were active architects of observers.