Clegg throws it all away

It was all going so well for Nick Clegg as he stood in for David “Junior Partner” Cameron at Prime Minister’s Questions. He told Jack Straw – who is officially in the shadow cabinet list the “acting shadow deputy prime minister” – that the deadline for withdrawing from Afghanistan was 2015, not 2014, and it was not “carved in stone”.

After a quick word in between questions from William Hague, sitting on his left, Clegg stood up and said that, actually, it was carved in stone and yes, “we will see British troops out by 2015″.

But Straw seemed not to notice and changed the subject to some obscure forensic point-scoring about Sheffield Forgemasters. This may be quite important, but the details, fatally, involved the dilution of shareholdings and who said what to whom when.

With one bound, Clegg was free. He’d escaped a glaring inconsistency about a central question of foreign policy, the benches behind him were cheering him on and he was on best son-in-law behaviour, calling his Conservative questioners his honourable friends.

But then, right at the end, Clegg threw it all away as he went for what he obviously thought was a clinching line in response to Straw’s last question – so that the acting shadow DPM would not be able to respond – by demanding that he explain his part in the “illegal war” in Iraq. The Tory benches behind Clegg, who had more or less all supported the invasion, froze in silence.

Nick: just because Baroness Manningham-Buller has a bad case of the Ed Milibands (“now you come to mention it, I do remember that I was against it all along”), and gave the anti-war media the headlines they wanted, does not mean that everyone disagreed or disagrees with the war.

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