That Nice Nick Clegg!

Today we have the Lib-Dems claiming that the other parties are running scared of them and as a result the media is trying to smear them. This, of course, is rich for a party which, certainly at local level, does its very best to smear the other candidates.

But this is not the reason; up to now I, and no doubt many others have considered the Lib-Dems to be a total irrelevance. But with their recent poll showings, the media, and indeed any thinking voter, wants to know more about the party which could possibly hold the balance of power. It is surely for this reason that they are being subject to this extra scrutiny.

And what one finds is not particularly nice. The Daily Telegraph today highlights the fact that Nick Clegg has been receiving substantial sums of money from business donors into his private bank account. Inside, Andrew Gilligan discusses some of the dirty tricks that the party has got up to at local level, along with Nick Clegg's previous life as an MEP and subsequently as a lobbyist for the company GPlus which was acting on behalf of RBS to get EU financial legislation watered down. The latter activity hardly sits well with his present claim that financial legislation needs tightening and that his is the party to do it.