I see there is a new spirit of openness and honesty abroad in politics, and Our Glorious Leader has chosen to publicly state what he thinks of various members of the party - either that or he's too stupid to realise that a commuter flight is a public place, and I don't think we want to countenance that, do we? And I'm not even going to TALK about the big hole in his green credentials from taking an inland flight... - so in the spirit of that frank discussion, I'd like to share with you all what I think of Our Glorious Leader.

• I think he hasn't established himself as a credible force in politics, and no amount of slagging other people off is going to disguise that.
• I think he should be doing more to make our message sellable, and understandable to those who are perhaps not as high-IQed as the average Lib Dem, and he ought to have done more to sell it.
• I think he ought to be actively doing something about the effective media blackout that exists on Lib-Dem-stories-which-aren't-Vince's-punditry, and making it clear to the public that we do actually exist. The fact that there are politically clued-up people on my f-list who don't know the first thing about our policies speaks volumes about the fact that we simply are not communicating with people.
• But worst of all, I think he fully deserves the Cameron-lite label he hates - not because of his politics, which I mostly share, but because of the off-handed and arrogant way he behaves towards people he perceives as less important than him, which I have witnessed first hand. Let me make clear that he is the ONLY example of such behaviour towards the "lower orders" that I have seen at any level of the party. EVERYBODY else seems capable of treating people from the hotel cleaner to the Queen as equally human, but Our Glorious Leader is just Too Important to acknowledge some people, and that just sticks in my craw.

I think the thing that pissed me off the most about that article were his comments about Julia Goldsworthy. I met her at conference, and she makes me feel like I have an IQ of about 3.5. She is a bloody smart cookie. If people are patronising Julia and underestimating her, Nick (presumably because she is young and pretty and female) you can USE that. To see you sidelining her because other people do? That speaks VOLUMES about how little you understand white male privilege and how it works, and it also speaks volumes about how paper-thin your commitment to gender issues is.

Fail, Glorious Leader. Epic fail.

Of course, all this makes the assumption that what is printed in the Mirror is true, which, as we all know, isn't necessarily the case. If it isn't true, or is only partially true, then I will, of course, retract the parts of it that don't apply. Shall we be seeing legal action against the Mirror, Leader?

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With regard to the tax credits thing? I'm going to put it on the Visa. I'm not physically capable of going through all that anguish again, and what's another £200 on the mountain of debt I already owe? Thanks for all your comments, though. You guys rock.