I seem to have been surrounded by jubilant Estonians this week. After Kristina Smigun manged to bring home two olympic gold medals, Andrus Veerpalu has added a third. It puts Estonia sixth on the medal table at this point, behind Germany, the US, Russia, Austria and France, but ahead of Norway and Canada, Switzerland and Sweden. Since the population of Estonia is only 1.3 million, the per capita medal ratio is astounding and puts the country firmly at the top of the table. No wonder my friends are wreathed in smiles.
It is probably fair to say that the advent of Nick Clegg, the new leader of the Liberal Democrats, has not been greeted with unalloyed joy by our Conservative opponents. Indeed, it would hardly be wrong to say that the past few weeks has seen some "pretty robust" debate between Conservative and Liberal Democrat bloggers. Even the Queen Mum of blogging, the generally genial Iain Dale seems to have been featuring as many stories as he can to try to show Liberal Democrats in as poor a light as possible. Neither, to be fair, has the traffic been all one way: I have "fisked' Mr. Cameron's rather half-baked proposals on health, and attacked several of the Conservative positions that have emerged from the fog of their policy making process. Most Liberal Democrats have attacked the Conservatives probably with more vigour even than the distrusted, discredited Labour government. So what lies behind this sharper debate, this emerging war in the blogosphere? Partly- in my ...
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