Nick Clegg is cooking up a ballot box bloodbath

“The knowledge that his time at the top of politics is now limited may explain Clegg’s increasingly bizarre behaviour.”

Nick Clegg has a hunger. Not to win the Euro elections, that would be daft, the Lib Dems are facing an electoral apocalypse this week. He seems to have an actual hunger.

In the last week the Lib Dem leader has publicly pronounced on milkshakes, biscuits, cheese and his favourite dinner.

Perhaps this trend is driven by the knowledge that this time next year he’ll have had his chips. The one year to the General Election landmark has passed. That’s one more year left in office for Clegg.

He talks of another coalition and plenty of Westminster watchers are looking for signs he’s cosying up to either Labour or the Tories with an eye on getting into bed with them after 2015.

Truth is, even if there is another hung parliament, the chances of Clegg being a part of the electoral matchmaking are next to zero. Swathes of his MPs are going to be defeated.

Even their strongholds in the south west of England are likely to fall. The Tories are pouring time and resources into the area. Their secret weapon is a postman turned parliamentary candidate they hope will deliver victory in Cornwall.

Clegg cannot survive the coming ballot box bloodbath.

It will be the very definition of hubris that the man who allegedly demanded Gordon Brown step down in 2010 because he’d clearly been rejected by the electorate, will have to follow in his footsteps when voters do the same to him in 2015.

The knowledge that his time at the top of politics is now limited may explain Clegg’s increasingly bizarre behaviour in the last few weeks.

He’s added to his regular radio phone-in show with a weekly session on Twitter in which people can ask him anything they want. Inevitably that’s led to plenty of funnies and lots of jokes at his expense.

Surprisingly, he’s chosen to answer some of the sillier enquiries.

Most of them were about food. He was asked his favourite milkshake flavour and said it was strawberry (pink! A bit like red, a sign he’s courting Labour?) but added apropos of nothing that he always dunks his hobnobs.

This week he revealed his favourite cheese, which is Wookey Hole cheddar, and his favourite dinner which, in the manner of vacuous pop stars interviewed in teen pop magazines down the years, he said was “anything Mediterranean”.

The One Direction Clegg will be following in the next 12 months is the exit from his swanky Whitehall suite.

His recent references to comestibles have led some to speculate Clegg fancies his own cookery show when he’s finished in Westminster. Ready Cleggy Cook perhaps?

More seriously, Clegg has got himself in a food fight with the Department for Education.

Michael Gove’s ministry were caught on the hop last year when the Lib Dem leader announced at conference that all pupils in the first three years of school would be entitled to free school meals.

Disputes over funding broke out for it seemed that Clegg had only accounted for the cost of food, not that of installing kitchens in every school in the land.

As the argument boiled over, Michael Gove’s ideological henchmen were only too happy to stoke the squabble with leaked emails purporting to show the numbers didn’t add up.

For some reason Clegg wouldn’t let the issue go, keeping it running on newspapers’ politics pages but to no apparent benefit for him.

“The proof of the policy will be in the eating of the pudding,” he said, confusingly.

His chief tormentor, a former special adviser to Gove, accused Clegg of doing his sums on the back of a fag packet. Given he’s partial to a ciggy that could literally be true.

But more importantly the episode just added to the impression that Clegg’s career is going up in smoke.