Clegg Feels A Sharp Pain Between The Shoulder Blades.

After several months of concern over his health Nick Clegg has finally discovered the source of the pain between his shoulder blades. The discovery of a thin Tory blade protruding from his back should have come as no surprise, however, since Nick Clegg has been sinking a very similar blade into the collective back of the entire British electorate for the last two years. What prompted this sudden realisation was David Cameron's "reluctant" retreat over House of Lords reform today - something he's been "forced" into by a few Tory backbenchers who have threatened to throw their toys out of the pram. Nick Clegg has now managed to gain exactly nothing out his association with the most vicious Tory administration in living memory. Nothing except, that is, a total loss of support amongst the electorate who have watched as the LibDems have betrayed every principle they are supposed to stand for. Reform of the House of Lords was the policy that Nick Clegg sold the NHS down the river for and it was his last chance to get something for the LibDems that they could pretend to be proud of. Nick Clegg can no longer fail to see what everyone else in the country already knows - that David Cameron and his Tory pals would sell their own grandmother for an extra quid. Nor can he avoid the conclusion that has been evident to the rest of us for some time - that he is the most outwitted bungler in British politics. Still we can at least now sit back and watch the cat and dog fight between the Tories and the LibDems over the proposed boundary changes that Cameron hopes might save his party at the next election. Perhaps G4S could provide the referees.

Tory Nutters Stymie Lords Reform.

In a tremendous display of circular reasoning and spurious excuses Tory right-wing backbenchers , which is most of them, have launched a bid to scupper House of Lords reform. Led by the likes of Nicholas Soames, grandson of Sir Winston Churchill, they are "appalled" by the idea that a lucrative little earner when they retire may be taken off them. Hiding behind various spurious arguments about "democracy," something which every one of them would like to dispense with, the Tory backbenchers are also hoping to hand their LibDem coalition partners, something else they'd like to dispense with, a crushing defeat. In their usual way the Tories are hell bent of derailing reform in order to serve their own selfish ends and are cynically trying to manipulate public opinion against a long-overdue assault on their privileges. Far better, they tell us, to maintain this hang-over from the Medieval period - after all the rest of us are merely peasants and should do as we're told by the great and the good.