If the Conservatives' latest policy of a cut in national insurance was meant to give him a debating advantage against Vince Cable and Alistair Darling, the plan backfired in spectacular fashion.
The conservatives all express skepticism, some significant.
The prime minister tried to move the focus to Miliband after Reckless, whose defection from the Conservatives triggered the byelection, inflicted a humiliating blow.
The Conservatives have waited almost 20 years for their own "Portillo moment".
The Conservatives have slipped by one point to 34%.
Blurting out words like "freedom" and "liberty" has become an almost reflex response for too many "free market" conservatives as they try and rationalise anything that happens in and around the climate change issue.
In the key seats that gave the Conservatives power – places such as Telford, Warwickshire North and Bolton West – the reality is that there simply is no significant ethnic minority vote that can be mobilised.
The dominant narrative shaping this election – that it was neck-and-neck between Labour and the Conservatives and that a coalition deal was the most likely electoral outcome – turned out to be plain wrong.
Apart from two years under the Liberals between 1916-18, the seat was represented by the Conservatives up until 1997, when Richard Allen won it for the Liberal Democrats, subsequently handing it to rising star Clegg in 2005.
Labour are unchanged from the last Observer/Opinium poll a fortnight ago, on 37%, while the Conservatives drop to 26%.
Labour, the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats have, bizarrely, chosen this moment to converge in support of the kind of neoliberalism that has caused this crisis in the first place.
