Red Box - Times Online's Westminster blog

Nick Clegg: status conscious

Sir Menzies Campbell was always tortured over whether he should use the "Sir" in official Liberal Democrat literature after he became leader. In an effort to be on the side of the common man, he stopped party officials from using it.

So it is nothing short of hilarious that Nick Clegg has decided to adopt the styling "The Rt Hon Nick Clegg MP" in his official literature. It appears in his introduction to the new "City Manifesto" (not yet online, but page 2 when it appears). Maybe he hopes that parading his Privy Council credentials will impress the City.

His proposals - to end "light touch" regulation for consumer financial products - probably will not.

At least there were few witnesses. Despite hosting the launch at the cavernous Bloomberg London hq, only the Times, Scotsman, two Bloomberg reporters plus trade press turned up. At one point they even considered moving to a smaller room.

Nick Clegg talks to Piers Morgan about cross dressing and his sex life

Here are the best bits of a superbly entertaining GQ interview by Piers Morgan with Nick Clegg. Read it in full. Don't stop until the end.

PM Do you think you’re good in bed?
NC Um... er... I don’t think I am particularly brilliant or particularly bad! [Laughs]
PM What a typical Liberal Democrat answer, sitting on the fence.
NC Since the only judge of that is my wife...
PM Not the only judge. We’ve established there is at least one other out there.
NC Yes OK, well, not for a very long time.
PM How many women would actually know for a fact if you’re good in bed?
NC [Spluttering] Er... not a... not a list as long as yours, I’m sure.
PM How many are we talking: ten, 20, 30?
NC No more than 30.
PM So there are 30 women out there who could answer the question.
NC It’s a lot less than that.
PM And what would the general consensus be, do you think?
NC You’d have to ask them!
PM Ever had any complaints?
NC Oh God yes, of course.
PM Many?
NC No.
PM What would your wife say?
NC I think she’d be very content and happy.
PM Would you ever be unfaithful to her?
NC I certainly hope not.

PM You were photographed in drag at a fashion party in New York with Louis Theroux’s bother, Marcel. Correct?
NC Yes. We were invited to what we thought was going to be a fancy loft apartment where everyone was going to be high fashion, so we went out and bought some colourful stuff.
PM Women’s clothes?
NC Women’s clothes. We plunged in like two British wallies to be confronted by very cool people wearing normal clothes.
PM Do you still wear them?
NC Only in my spare time... [laughs] no.

Click below for the cactus incident and whether he'd send his kids to private school....

Lib Dems like you haven't seen them before

They loved Clegg in the hall, and the relief that he did well was palpable. Clegg's jokes worked better than on paper. His style is natural and engaging. Some bloggers sighed a weary "seen-it-all-before" sigh at Clegg pacing the stage without notes (he had an autocue). Don't forget: this just isn't something that happens at Lib Dem conference. Let them bask in the novelty.

The downside of his speech was his tendency to get carried away in his own rhetoric. Already Clegg is promising "the end of politics as usual", "a new type of government",  to "get the money out of politics", "public services that are human-sized, personal in nature, and designed for real people" and a "new NHS". And what about next year?

The delegates didn't care, though, and Clegg's speaking achievement was not the only significance of the weekend. It also showed where the party is heading: rightwards. Clegg has announced that, if possible, taxes will be lowered. They have embraced choice in health, backed with private provision if the public sector cannot deliver. Equidistance is now Clegg's formal position.

And it is not just the leadership making the shift.

A record number of delegates at conference voted away the committment to free healthcare for the elderly in favour of a scheme where costs are shared - and apparently not a single person attacked the move. All the health proposals sailed through on Saturday with none of the difficulty Sir Menzies encountered when trying to ditch the 50p top rate of tax or Trident. Whether this was simply a vote of confidence in the leader or a genuine mellowing of the more left-wing activists I'm not sure.

But the centreground of British politics is getting more competitive

Clegg: "It's been a tedious, uneventful week in Westminster"

If you thought that Nick Clegg might be reflective, even contrite, about the Liberal Democrats' difficult week and loss from the Shadow Cabinet of three colleagues, then you would be wrong.

He arrived in Liverpool for the party's spring conference insisting that he has captured the moral high ground. In his welcome speech to journalists, he began by saying that it had been a "tedious, uneventful" week in Westminster. Then he responded irritably to questions about whether he should have done things differently. Mistake.

Unlike the rest of the party, who seem quite relaxed about what happened, Team Clegg are intensely annoyed with the media for their reporting of the party's splits this week. They made a formal complaint to the BBC and today Clegg had a one-on-one with Helen Boaden, the corporation's head of news. He even assailed me for a Times leading article this morning that he described as "pious".

There is much more rough and tumble to come, particularly if he fulfils his promise to try to shake up Westminster. But his own colleagues agree what part of the current problem is: he needs to get a thicker skin.

The day the Speaker forgot Nick Clegg

No wonder Clegg is a bit snippy about Prime Minister's Questions: turns out last week - only his second appearance - the Speaker appears to have overlooked him. Established convention dictates Michael Martin now calls David Cameron, then a Labour MP, then Nick Clegg. Last week he called the Labour MP then went straight to a backbench Tory. A quick word in the ear from the Speaker's secretary was needed to sort it out. Clegg: he's not that unmemorable, surely?

PMQs 'absurd' says Nick Clegg

"Prime Minister's Question Time is absurd," Nick Clegg said at a town hall meeting in Buckinghamshire. "The whole thing is designed to flatter the Prime Minister and the leader of the Conservatives."

The Lib Dem leader has only had two weeks at it, both safe and competent. PMQs is a virility test, for better or worse, so no doubt he will be teased for this by some MPs when he returns to Westminster.

Hat tip Lib Dem Voice

Nick Clegg's first speech

Nick Clegg's first speech, and a chance for us to place him on the political spectrum. Not that Clegg would recognise it as a valid exercise, of course, since the Left-Right axis died out long ago in Liberal Democratonia (for the record, he believes that there are now two axes: progressive v conservative and liberals v "advocates of big-government solutions"), but let's do it anyway - and it looks as though there is slightly more to please the rightwardly inclined than the Left.

Appealing for Labour voters

- The Tories claim to care about poor families but their only spending commitment is still a tax cut for the richest people in the country. They still want to use the tax system to make moral judgments about whether people should get married or not. They are still devoted to school selection. They are still focused on escape routes for the lucky few, not real opportunities for the many. So much for social mobility.

- The state must intervene to allocate money on a fair basis.

- The state must intervene to guarantee equality of access in our schools and hospitals.

- We must end selection. Pupils and parents should pick schools, not the other way round. If new schools improve results only by selecting the cleverest pupils, one form of educational segregation will merely be replaced by another.

- I am totally committed to the National Health Service. It must always remain free at the point of use, accessible to all.

Appealing for Tory voters

- The past ten years has shown that money is not everything. The big questions now are these: how do we make Britain a fairer place without raising the overall tax burden? How do we promote real social mobility without relying on the discredited politics of Big Government? In seeking to make Britain fairer, we need to stop just asking "how much", and to start thinking hard about "how".

- Socialism believes that government knows best. Liberalism believes people know best.

- In place of nationalised industries we have nationalised education, nationalised health and nationalised welfare: run by inflexible, centralised monopolies. It adds up to the nationalisation of our whole lives.

- And the State must oversee core standards and entitlements.

- The first step is to scale back the vast monster of Whitehall. Whitehall should get out of the business of the day-to-day running of public services in Britain. That strategy doesn't work. We will draw up plans for radically shrinking the size of all our public service departments - to refocus them on setting broad objectives for the local agencies and people who deliver on the ground.

- It is time to call a fail, a fail.

- Everyone should have the right to receive private treatment, paid for by the NHS, if the waiting time is not met.

Appealing to nobody

- I want [the NHS] to become a People's Health Service.

Nick Clegg's big day

MPs of all shades seemed impressed by Nick Clegg's first performance at Prime Minister's Questions. No stumbling, clear delivery, strong choice of subject. It worked in the chamber, but was better on TV, apparently. In the post-match deconstruction in Members' Lobby, some on his own side acknowledged that Vince Cable-style star quality has yet to develop. "He needed to get over the psychological barrier," suggested one, but the look of relief was palpable on many Lib Dem faces, not least Clegg's.

No jokes yet, and deliberately so. The strategy was to keep it serious - humour is fine for an interim leader - but the high-minded promises of his victory speech needed to be fleshed out. Labour MPs on the left of the party and centre-ground Tories both agreed that he had picked a good subject - fuel prices and the impact on the poor - and there was considerable detail in his question. Both Gordon Brown and David Cameron fell over themselves to be welcoming, although Cameron must have been hoping to fluster his new opponent by choosing a pet Clegg topic - ID cards - for himself.

So having received advice from Vince, Sir Ming, Paddy and other Lib Dem luminaries, how did he prepare? Helping him from 9.30am this morning were Jon Oates, Director of Policy & Communications, Hannah Gardiner, his new head of press, Euan Roddin, the leader's speechwriter, and Polly Mackenzie, his long-standing policy adviser. The only MP to join them was Danny Alexander, his chief of staff. He then spent a while on his own rehearsing.

Lib Dem strategists said afterwards that his choice showed that Clegg, not Cameron, had focused on an issue that really mattered to voters. Now he has to be more than just competent to make his mark.

Nick Clegg imposes himself

Has Nick Clegg clipped the wings of Chris Rennard, the Liberal Democrat chief executive? Having been director of campaigns between 1989 and 2003 before his current role, Rennard has always been highly regarded around Westminster as a tactical master, particular at by-election time. Today a press release from the office of the new leader appeared to recast and perhaps even restrict his campaign role.

Rennard will be chairman of the general election campaign (a reappointment). Alongside him, Andrew Stunell will chair local elections (a new post), Willie Rennie will chair parliamentary campaigns (another new post, but what is it exactly?) and Ed Davey will be chairman of the campaigns and communications committee (as he was under Sir Menzies Campbell). This gives the impression of reining in Rennard's role, although Clegg's office insists that he will still oversee everything as chief executive and the move is designed to better use the party machine at election time. But if the personalities clash during the local election campaigns who has the last say? And it is not yet completely clear who is going to run a by-election. Titles often matter.

In the same announcement Clegg revealed that he has brought in John Starkey, the shrewd former MD of Saatchi & Saatchi and the man who helped to run Margaret Thatcher's 1987 general election campaign, as an adviser on strategic communications. Meanwhile, Chris Bones, from Henley Management College, will help Clegg to look at reforming party structures.