Hattie Harman tried to crack Clegg today. The deputy prime minister, standing in for David Cameron, explained carefully that his boss was visiting, ‘Israel and the Occupied Palestinian territories.’ Not a title the Israeli Tourist board has got round to using.
Hattie wasn’t on her best form. She tried to draw Clegg as a hypocritical house-slave attempting to duck responsibility for his master’s actions. But she plodded through her jibes. Over-rehearsal had killed her hunger to perform. And Clegg met all her accusations with a simple ploy. Blame Labour. It worked every time. On the bedroom tax Clegg had the support of the figures. A million and a half are on housing waiting lists. The same number are in homes with spare rooms. Makes sense.
Clegg took the opportunity to unfurl his new repertoire of vitriolic slogans. He said that Hattie and her colleagues had ‘sucked up to the City’, ‘crashed the economy’, and ‘left the worst peacetime deficit in history’.
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