Inside party leaders' minds

It’s a gruesome job, but someone has to go there.

Is Nick Clegg suffering from split personality or memory loss? He tells an interviewer that he & Cameron will have to take a view if Huhne is charged:

Of course, that is a very serious issue if that were to arise. We as a Government want the highest standards of probity to be in place in everything that is done by Cabinet members.

Message received. Then later Clegg says:

I would like to see David Laws back in government – not just because I admire him a lot and he is a close colleague and friend of mine – I just so happen to think he would be very good for the Government and good for Britain.

That would be Mr Laws the self-confessed expenses thief. Wasn’t there something about standards of probity in government…?

Meanwhile, Mr Miliband has been demonstrating the hazard of spending too much time surrounded by other lefties. In his interview he says:

I think we can create jobs in the public sector. We can give help to the private sector too.

He is then asked whether he is backing an “increase in the size of the public sector”, and replies:

Well, we’re not short of things to do in our country. When we look around and we think about the jobs that could be created for our young people both in the public sector and the private sector – we’re not short of things to do.

What the Rubik genius is short of, though, is money. State debt under the coalition has continued spiralling upwards – but we don’t want to talk about that. Let’s take and more more money out of voters’ pockets to do the things which our gifted masters have identified as the “things to do in our country”?

Why not go the whole hog and take all of everybody’s earnings, and just give them enough back to feed and warm themselves? After all, money grows on trees, voters don’t know what’s good for them, we can trust the superior wisdom of people like Ed Balls and Peter Hain and the awful Mrs Balls. Those ghastly voters will only fritter the money away on lager and holidays and conservatories and their children. The philosopher geeks know best.

Mr Miliband has picked out the big political issue:

Intergenerational justice, intergenerational fairness and equality is going to be the issue of the next 10 or 15 years. Is this generation, my generation, going to do right by the younger generation?

By bequeathing them ever higher levels of debt, Ed? Those “intergenerational” tags just roll off the tongue, don’t they.

What fun it must be at Primrose Hill dinner parties dreaming up ways to spend other people’s money!

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