Don't mock Nick Clegg – he may stay in power for a generation | Simon Jenkins

Since 2010 the deputy PM has been dismissed as politically crippled. Yet his cunning could leave him kingmaker again

Any fool can knock a coalition. So it proved today. Broken, lamentable, single-bedded, farcical, split, doomed, were among the responses to the "mid-term report" from the David Cameron-Nick Clegg coalition on Monday. What a shower they apparently were.

I suspect history will be kinder. Theirs, after all, was no normal marriage. It was a shotgun wedding, forced on the two parties...