PMQs sketch: Clegg has fun on the train set, but he's killed chances of a Lib-Lab pact

Crash-bang-wallop. The chances of a Lib-Lab pact in 2015 have just gone hurtling through the floor.

David Cameron is away in Beijing looking for Chinese venture capitalists who can turn Britain into the new Africa. Nick Clegg took his place at PMQs. He lost no time socking it to Labour.

They were intellectually bankrupt, he said, and economically illiterate. Their energy policy was a con. And union stooges were swamping their membership lists. Harriet Harman hit back. ‘Leave it to us to worry about our party members,’ she said, ‘especially as so many of them used to be his.’ She dismissed Clegg’s favourite idea that he acts as a brake on Conservative policy. ‘He’s the accelerator,’ she gloated. A Tory prime minister, she went on, couldn’t hope for more loyal deputy. Tribal hatred simmered in her eye.

Clegg rejected her claim that the Tories’ worst policies had LibDem support.