Nick Clegg: Electoral Commission needs an overhaul to become a bloodhound sniffing out wrong doing.

Duncan Borrowman: a thorough fisking of Derek Conway’s latest public utterances. For example:

Let us look at the next few lines of what Mr Conway said to the Bexley Extra (I can’t find this on-line):

“The question turned on how many hours he would have done as a student and that he was paid six per cent above the mid-point of the lowest grade.

“The Committee argued he should have been on the starting point of the lowest grade. The rest is press fabrication.”

Hmmm. Well I

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As if giving two major speeches today wasn’t enough, Nick also has an op-ed column in The Times, titled How to stop future funding scandals:

The Derek Conway affair is not the first, nor likely to be the last, in a long line of political scandals over money. While such scandals have formed a steady trickle for generations, the floodgates seemed to open 18 months ago with the cash-for-peerages investigation. It may be tempting for politicians to argue that each scandal is separate from the others, but the British people simply don’t see it that way.

It’s time to admit there’s a

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Nick’s making two major speeches today – on mental health (to the Guardian Public Services summit) and on the economy (in the City of London).

The mental health speech has been released and you can read it in full over on the party website. The headline message from the speech is in the party’s news release:

In a key speech on health service reform, Liberal Democrat Leader Nick Clegg unveiled plans to guarantee everyone suffering from mental health problems a first appointment for treatment within 13 weeks of referral.

The plans were launched as the Party reveals new figures showing that the

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