“For Nick Clegg, it’s like being a woman at a dinner party,” says Rachel Sylvester in The Times. “You say something and nobody notices, then a man repeats the same thing more loudly and everyone laughs.”
David Cameron’s widely praised plan to raise the personal allowance to £12,500 was pinched from the Lib Dems and Ed Miliband has “swiped” the party’s mansion tax plan.
Seven months before the general election, the Lib Dems’ biggest problem is “invisibility”. As they slip to 7% in the polls, some 56% of voters think they have become “irrelevant”.
Clegg’s response is to reposition his traditionally maverick party on the centre ground. His argument is that Labour can’t be trusted on the economy, while the Tories have abandoned “compassionate Conservatism” and are “going after your public services”.
The Lib Dems’ Glasgow conference slogan, “Stronger Economy, Fairer Society”, is a “deliberate echo of New Labour’s promise to combine economic credibility and social justice”. But to get noticed, the Lib Dems need “positive identity as well as negative definition”.
I thought Clegg “found his voice” this week, says Mary Riddell in The Daily Telegraph. Though careful not to rule out being a “Conservative adjunct” after the next election, he set himself up as “friend of the poor”, a “doughty pro-European and champion of human rights”: messages tailored to a party whose soul has “always remained faithful to the left”.
He has promised to have mental illness treated on a par with physical illness and proposes to increase the personal allowance to £11,000, funding it by raising capital gains (CGT) rates for higher earners and cutting the CGT allowance to £2,600.
There is more to Clegg than “guile and self-preservation”, says Janan Ganesh in the FT. The Lib Dems have “legitimised a lot of hard but necessary work by giving it the imprimatur of bipartisanship”.
He may be despised, but Clegg can feel more confident of remaining in power than any other party leader. The Lib Dems probably only need to keep half of their 56 seats to decide who governs. “For a man everyone believes is half-clown, half-huckster, it is some feat.”