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Two cheers for the Liberal Democrats. But only two. One for Nick Clegg, who yesterday made a speech on liberalism, thoughtful enough to have gone largely unreported. One for his team of MPs who, as observant readers of today's Guardian will have noticed, generated three of the first four stories on pages one and two.
Polly Curtis's front page lead (unearthed by David Laws) concerned the 1 million poor children not getting free school meals as a result of flaws in the funding system. Allegra Stratton's report on 30 years of accidental pension overpayments was placed in the public domain by the Lib Dem Treasury spokesman, Vince Cable.
As for John Vidal's page two row over police non-injuries (bee stings and such) while on duty at the Kingsnorth power station demo that seems to have emerged from FoI applications made on behalf of David Howarth, the party's cerebral justice spokesman, a working class boy turned Cambridge law lecturer (and local MP) of whom we will hear more if there is ever a hung parliament.
Excellent. That is what MPs are supposed to be about, probing vigilance in the public interest. Gordon Brown and Tony Blair were pretty sharp in opposition, but it has taken the Cameroon leadership to get the Tories back into focus. Chris Grayling is, I think, best, though he makes mistakes – they all do.
All right, online readers want to know the fourth story, the one the Lib Dems didn't generate. It's the annual Christmas card report. We've all seen the Cameron family card, which I thought fine but others didn't. Today we get the Blairs looking relaxed and well.
Tony and Cherie are photographed standing in front of a bookshelf (to dispel the suspicion, which I shared, that TB used books mainly to keep the door open?). By way of sharp contrast, there is also GB's slightly bleak photo of the big black door at No 10, with snow (where did they get it?) on the ground. Not a sign of the family, a restraint which some will applaud. Others may read too much into the wreath on the knocker.
Back to the Lib Dems and Clegg's speech to the Demos thinktank in London. Here's what he called the speech's core sound bite:
"Liberalism, progressive liberalism, has always been and always will be about the dispersal and distribution of power. A liberal abhors excessive concentrations of power in politics and economics alike.
"I believe monopoly in the market place is as destructive of creativity and autonomy as is monopoly in politics. And underpinning this attitude towards power, there is a particular liberal attitude towards people.
"Like all liberals, I have an optimistic attitude towards people. That most people, most of the time, will make the right decisions for themselves, their family and their community."
He goes on to accuse Labour of being irreducibly statist in attitude and the Tories of being hopelessly split between paternalistic assumptions that most people can't look after themselves and a consumerist, market-driven view, uneasily underpinned by " a brittle, slightly neurotic nationalism".
The past decade has exposed the weakness of both views, notably in the unregulated market crash. David Cameron got rather more publicity when he address the City's "day of reckoning" yesterday - though it failed to impress Polly Toynbee, who thinks Gordon Brown should have made it. That should ensure he won't.
All good clean fun for the Lib Dems, for whom I have a soft spot as the indispensable grease which oils the cogs of the Westminster two-party system. Their frequent lapses into priggishness, unattractive when combined with their share of low-level opportunism, is a small price to pay. After all, they do suffer terribly from the bigger parties pinching their good ideas and mocking what's left.
But why only two cheers today? Because I thought I heard Vince Cable engaging in a spot of low politics when he discussed the pensions error on Radio 4's Today programme, naughty boy.
We all admire Dr Vince, who knows his economics and is a thoroughly nice man. He got the tip that Xafinity, a privatised agency, had paid out too much to 2 million pensions, from a Radio Ulster journalist.
As requested by the Treasury he waited a few days so that Whitehall could sort it out and alert the pensioners affected - rather than "do an Ed Stourton" and alert them via the media. Ministers were cross, but Cable says he stuck by the agreement until he told MPs about it during the final stage of the budget debate last night.
It prompted Alistair Darling to intervene on him thus:
"I half expected the Hon Gentleman to intervene earlier. There will be a statement tomorrow, but I want to clarify one of the points that he made. He was asking about repayment of money that has been wrongly paid. I think it would be better if I made it clear that that will not happen."
That seems pretty clear to me: no clawback. But Vince said it wasn't clear and thus felt able to scare pensioners a bit on the radio today. "The chancellor seems to have ruled it out," he conceded a bit sorrowfully, before going on to keep talking about the clawback option.
Not very naughty in the larger scheme of things - Northern Rock's Adam Applecart or Wall St swindler (alleged) Bernard Madoff ( shouldn't that be Madeoff?) - but a useful reminder that, for all their high-minded talk the Lib Dems can sometimes be a slippery as their rivals.
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