It’s probably a little mean of me to dust off the yellow blowtorch that is the Media Moron Watch for this piece from politics.co.uk. It’s by no means a hatchet job – interviews with Clegg never are because it’s generally obvious, as here, that the journalist likes him. And he takes on board Clegg’s main point – that there must be a radical rethink of the relationship between the banks, the state and the public.

But I can’t help it. We’re faced with the turgidly familiar demand that Clegg define everything on a single axis of The Left and The Right, accompanied by a thumping noise as the journalist swoons to the ground in self-gratification at successfully posing “the tough questions”. Why, I’m practically Jeremy Paxman already…

“The debate about the market is crucial,” Clegg admits. “You have to decide where the market begins and ends. It’s not ‘are you against markets’. I’m a huge fan of markets, where the markets are competitive. The thing is, you have to decide where markets stop.”

I ask him if he’d describe that as left wing. It’s certainly how it sounds.

“I’ve never viewed it as a debate about free markets and no regulation,” he replies. “All markets exist in regulation, they always have done. A totally free market doesn’t exist. It’s a question of where you regulate and where you regulate heavily.”

That doesn’t quite answer the question, so I ask it again. “Do I think it’s left wing?” he repeats. “I think it’s liberal.”

I suggest that isn’t quite an answer either.

Look, Nick Clegg did not reply, I really am sorry, I know you’re just trying to do your job and that’s the question you probably think a broadsheeter would ask me, so you’re asking it too. Over and over again. I’m guessing you have a  degree in English Literature or something similar and think being liberal largely means being knowledgeable about wine, and you probably have trouble with the notion that any Serious Political Issue can be discussed at all without having a big pile of blue and red tiddlywinks to hand, but I’m afraid it falls to me to tell you that you’re asking a woefully ill-informed question framed in terms of a feeble pair of two-dimensional half-assumptions that quite simply don’t matter a flying bat’s fart to me, and which only matter to you because you’ve been brainwashed since birth into accepting the inevitable supremacy of a two-party consensual rule system, easi-peel labels supplied as standard. So I didn’t answer it. Sorry.

Our puzzled friend also subscribes unthinkingly to the idea that the appointment of Peter Mandelson represents some sort of complex economic seachange whose ramifications are surely the question on every politico’s lips. Number 10’s press team would be proud. Clegg, being on planet Earth, can’t help with this:

“The relationship between government, regulators and banks has changed forever,” he says. “We will no longer regard banks as just another business, just another commercial sector. It’s clearly an area where you need far more intelligent regulation to ensure that banks don’t gamble with our money.”

It’s not dissimilar to the noises coming from Downing Street. The prime minister has found a new lease of life since the financial situation shifted from gloomy to cataclysmic. Now, New Labour is the party of regulation and a new global economic system. But plenty of onlookers found that a curious message to be broadcasting when you’re moving seasoned free-marketeers like Peter Mandelson into government and, for whatever reason, leaving out veteran left-wingers like backbencher Jon Cruddas. I put that to Clegg, but he looks slightly perplexed.

“I don’t really know what the significance of Peter Mandelson’s appointment is. It’s uh”

“You seem slightly irritated by the question,” I say.

“No, no, no,” he’s quick to reply. Nick Clegg, by the way, is a Nice Bloke. “I’m not irritated. I’m just not sure it has any bearing on the specific nature of regulation.

“It just seems to me a given that the regulatory environment of the City has to change forever. We now see, more than we’ve ever seen before, that banks are such important lubricants in a modern capitalist system that to simply turn a blind eye – which is effectively what’s happened – and allow them to take huge risks. Well, that can never happen again.”

I say that Mandelson’s introduction doesn’t suggest a leftward shift in government policy, as many of the Labour members hearing Brown’s conference speech could have fairly presumed.

What a depressing gulf there is here between the man gamely trying to discuss the issues and the man doing a sort of desperately impressionistic football commentary on a game of cabinet musical chairs in Westminster Village. Once upon a time I suppose the former would have been the journalist and the latter the politician. Who exactly is holding whom to account these days?