“I want to fight a positive campaign, so I just simply say that I think Nick has great strengths. … The record is that last summer, for example, the Tory blogs were criticising my Tory opponent because he wasn’t getting as much coverage on the floods and foot and mouth as I was, and in fact some of them were calling for his resignation. If you look over the last year, I’ve consistently been ahead in terms of media coverage of my Tory opposite number, and that’s one of the reasons why I think that we’ve done so well in terms of public perception on the environment.”

He then implicitly has a go Clegg

Well, one of the things that I know as an economist and as a journalist is that both politicians and journalists tend to be very bad at numbers, and numbers are often the evidence so you need to look at things like poll numbers before you shoot from the hip, and that does worry me slightly, but I think that you need to actually go back and look at what the real situation is we’ve done very well on the environment over the last couple of years and I think that if you compare that with any other area you’ll see that it’s the only major area where not only are we in the lead over other parties, but it’s also the only area where we’ve built up our lead over the other parties.

He obviously is pointing to the LibDem numbers which show them polling badly on Home Affairs issues compared to the authoritarian-populist Labour party and the Law and Order loving Tories. Clegg is the Home Affairs spokesman…