Nobody has summarised the Daily Mail better than The Daily Mash website.

Michael Rawlins’ elegant recent rejoinder to a magnificent and 70+% wrong Mail story deserved mention.

But the Mail has excelled itself with this world-class piece of bullshit.

As biased questions go in an opinion poll, this is hard to beat. The ‘do you still beat your wife?’ school of thought is all over this.

It has inspired a new dose of Maynard Doctrine for its hilarious misrepresentation that “it emerged yesterday that Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg has called for the NHS to be broken up”. Even this sentence is wrong: it didn’t emerge yesterday; it emerged in 2005, when he gave the interview in question to The Independent.

Just the facts, eh, Mr Dacre?

Nevertheless, the Lib Dems wil be delighted by this cack-handed crack at Saint Nick. Its more than mild smack of despair, in going back to what used to be Lib Dem thinking (a broad church at the best of times), is a sign of the right-wing press’s fear of a party they have ignored or cannot control.

Harold Wilson famously said, in a much more revolutionary time, that a week is a long time on politics.

The next ten days will be longer still.