I like Nick Clegg, I really do. I'm quite fond of the Liberals, too, as throughout the last 13 years of creeping authoritarianism they have consistently spoken up for civil liberties and political reform.

Having said that, this prolonged media orgasm about Clegg's debate performance and subsequent poll surge is really starting to irk me.

It's impossible to tell how much of it is real - the media needed a line on the debate story, quickly coalesced around a blatantly exaggerated Clegg 'win', ran it endlessly, then went apeshit when - quel surprise - some of the public reflected this view back to them (in polling, and then in the even more suspect vox pops).

The numbers are soft, there's really no way to know what they mean beyond the fact that more people now know who Clegg and the Lib Dems are. But despite that, it seems to be all the pundits are talking about. I can't remember the last time anyone asked or answered a decent probing question about the deficit.