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We've all seen the commercials. There's a sad little white marshmallow, a person in a darkened room unable to attend the party, or unable to enjoy a beautiful day. And then a voice shouts out that here is hope. That depression of yours is a result of imbalances in chemicals in your brain and, if you can correct those chemicals, you will feel better. Easy!

It's not that these commercials sell you a pack of lies. Most antidepressants do increase the levels of chemical messengers in the brain called neurotransmitters. A specific type of neurotransmitter, the monoamines, appear to be the chemicals of choice for these drugs. Scientists once thought that simply increasing the amount of monoamines in the brain would treat the symptoms of depression. And that meant, of course, that depression itself must be caused by low levels of monoamines, particularly serotonin.

For years, scientists have tried to find drugs that increase these serotonin levels in the brain safely, and tried to find evidence that decreases in monoamines are responsible for depression itself.

Well, after much searching, we did find a lot of very interesting things. But some things just didn't add up.

The first problem was one of time. If low serotonin levels were really what made you feel depressed, then increasing levels of serotonin should alleviate the symptoms right away. But antidepressants don't work immediately, and in fact can take more than a month to alleviate symptoms. Strike one.

The second problem was one of whether the drugs actually worked. Serotonin-specific antidepressant drugs don't work on everyone. In fact, new estimates show that the current antidepressants on the market only work in about 60% of patients. If low serotonin levels were really responsible for depression, then increasing serotonin should have worked on more than 60% of patients. Strike two.

The final problem is one of evidence. If low serotonin levels were responsible for depressed mood, then we should be able to induce depression in people by decreasing serotonin, and we should find low levels of serotonin in patients with depression. But neither of those things exist. Decreasing serotonin in humans can lower your mood, but it doesn't always work. And studies looking for low serotonin in depressed patients have been inconclusive. It appears that even though antidepressants increase serotonin, a lack of serotonin doesn't cause depression (kind of like aspirin treats a headache, but headaches are not caused by a lack of aspirin). Strike three. Serotonin is out.

So what's in? After all, antidepressants do work in some patients. It's instructive to look at other things these drugs are doing in the brain.

Antidepressants increase levels of neurotransmitters in the brain, but they also increase neurogenesis, the birth of new cells in the brain. Throughout your life, you will grow new neurons in an area of the brain called the hippocampus. And if you take antidepressants for several weeks, you will get increased neurogenesis.

These new neurons correspond to changes in animal behaviours that are associated with long-term antidepressant treatment. The behaviours are novelty-induced hypophagia, which measures how much of a tasty food an animal will eat in a novel environment and reflects aspects of anxiety and anhedonia (the inability to experience pleasure); and the tail suspension test, which measures behavioural despair.

A former clown who is expected to win a seat in Brazil's congress when the country goes to the polls on Sunday will be prevented from taking office until he passes a test proving that he can read and write, a judge in Sao Paulo has ruled. Francisco Silva, a circus performer turned TV comedian who is better known by his stage name "Tiririca" – the colloquial Portuguese word for "grumpy" – is accused of being among the one in 10 of his countrymen who are virtually illiterate.

The allegation could prevent him sitting in congress, even though polls suggest that he will win more votes than any other candidate, since (for mostly practical reasons) the Brazilian constitution requires all of the nation's politicians to be able to read.

It marks the latest twist in an extraordinary political odyssey which began when Silva decided to join a string of celebrities and former sportsmen, such as the World Cup-winning footballer Romario, among the 6,000 people standing for one of the 513 seats in the country's lower house of parliament.

What started out as a joke quickly turned serious when tens of millions of people began watching satirical campaign adverts on YouTube, in which he dances around in a multicoloured outfit repeating slogans such as: "It can't get any worse!" and "What does a federal deputy do? Truly, I don't know. But vote for me and you'll find out!"

The adverts have struck a chord with voters, who are increasingly disillusioned with mainstream politicians following a string of corruption scandals. Opinion polls suggest that Silva is now on course to get more than a million votes, which would make him the most successful candidate in the election.

Silva's working-class background – he was brought up in the impoverished north-eastern state of Ceara – at first seemed to add to his populist allure. But as his stock has risen, so has the volume of public speculation about his literacy.

On Sunday, news magazine Epoca reported that people who have worked with Silva on his TV shows, and collaborated on a book credited to him, say he cannot read or write. A video on the publication's website showed an interview in which a reporter asked Silva to read from a sheet of questions about public policy. Visibly shaken, he began stammering; eventually aides were summoned to read them for him.

Silva's official campaign has refused to comment on the controversy. However, a federal prosecutor in Sao Paolo asked the country's electoral court to intervene. In a statement, the court said that Silva will still be allowed to stand in Sunday's election. But before he is sworn into office, he will be required to publicly take a literacy test to settle the matter once and for all.

drive from www.independent.co.uk

A ten-minute walk from Ireland's main thoroughfare, O'Connell Street, takes you past monument after monument to the greed and profligacy of the Celtic Tiger years. Between the northern end of Dublin's busiest street and the 81,000-capacity stadium at Croke Park are swathes of waste ground where new private and public housing projects should have been built.

Behind the Gaelic sports stadium lies a square of boarded-up terraced houses earmarked for redevelopment during the boom times, which now stand empty because the state, and the property developers whose building programmes overheated the economy, are broke.

In a project called Croke Villas behind the stadium's Cusack stand, Dublin corporation, in alliance with the builders, had promised residents of run-down postwar flats new homes in an exciting public-private housing partnership. Now that the money has run out, some people still live in the old flats complex, while the promised houses remain empty shells.

As the spectre of a double-dip recession looms over the republic even areas close to the heart of the Irish capital are starting again to resemble the recession-ravaged 1980s.

The Irish government has to prepare the country's population for yet another austerity budget in December – its fourth in two years. Last week finance minister Brian Lenihan's budgetary plans were thrown into further chaos by more alarming economic data. Irish gross domestic product fell by 1.2% in the second quarter of this year, unlike the rest of the eurozone, where growth is averaging about 1%. As a result Ireland is more vulnerable to a further loss of investor confidence.

Prime minister Brian Cowen's Fianna Fáil/Green party coalition has tried to instil global faith in the Irish economy by slashing public spending. Lenihan had planned to take a further €3bn (£2.5bn) out of the economy – but the latest growth figures suggest those budget cuts may now be made even deeper.

The prognosis from Irish economy-watchers last week was grim. "This is a dismal situation and is now so grave that the Irish have no choice but to introduce even tougher austerity measures," said Chris Scicluna, an economist at Daiwa Capital Markets. "On every measure – the depth of the recession, the cost of the bailout, the collapse of the construction sector, and the higher cost of issuing debt – Ireland is top of the tree."

On the bright side, economists including Mike Smyth at the University of Ulster believe the republic's brutal cost-cutting programmes have been "exemplary" compared with the rest of the EU. Smyth, a member of an EU-led Brussels thinktank of European economists, has argued that Lenihan's cuts lead the way for other economies in trouble – principally Spain, Portugal and Greece.

Others, including those linked to the trade union movement, contend that the Dublin government's austerity programme has failed to win over the sceptics on the international bond markets and credit rating agencies.

Mike Tait, economic researcher for the Unite union in Ireland – pointing to a line of terraced cottages on Foster Terrace close to Croke Park that at the height of the boom were fetching up to €250,000 – said: "You certainly wouldn't get anywhere near that price now – or in the future."

Tait argued that the austerity programme over the past 18 months failed to impress international markets.

drive from www.guardian.co.uk

It could barely have been closer. Ed Miliband's election as the 17th leader of the Labour Party went down to the wire, his victory over his elder brother, David, all the more painful because it was by such a slender margin. Just 50.65 per cent to 49.35 per cent.

Despite ending his brother's long-held dream of leading his party, Ed Miliband's reliance on trade union votes to overcome David's support from Labour MPs and party members threatens to perpetuate the struggle between the two wings of the party.

Severing ties with the Blair-Brown era, Mr Miliband pledged to "turn the page" in Labour's history books to mobilise hundreds of thousands of young people to his party's cause. "A new generation has stepped forward to serve our party, and in time I hope to serve our country. Today, the work of the new generation begins."

To the repeated refrain of "I get it", he insisted he understood why Labour lost in May, including voters' concerns about immigration, pay and housing.

As the younger son of the Marxist writer Ralph Miliband, Ed has finally broken free of his brother's shadow, having followed a similar path to the heart of the Labour Party and the top of government. Former teachers at Haverstock School in north London more easily recall the elder Miliband, to whom Ed was always compared.

At work, both were policy-wonks who moved seamlessly from the back-rooms of government to safe Labour seats and into the Cabinet itself – all of this under the tutelage of a prime minister. For David, Tony Blair was his tutor. For Ed, Gordon Brown. Perversely, it was the elder brother's association with the more successful Labour leader that attracted the most negative attention.

During the four-month leadership contest, Ed, who became an MP only in 2005, was criticised for distancing himself from Labour's record, notably on the Iraq war, tuition fees and a third runway at Heathrow. He stood up to the criticism of Lord Mandelson while firing his own shots at Tony Blair's record.

In his first speech as leader yesterday, he acknowledged the damage caused by a seemingly interminable contest: "I have to unify this party and I will. I am going to show that I understand the need to change."

He paid tribute to the leadership of both Mr Blair and Mr Brown, the latter re-emerging on to the political stage for the first time since leaving No 10 with a typically understated speech to the Manchester conference hall.

In his own speech, Mr Miliband added: "I recognise, above all, the scale of the journey on which we must embark to win back your trust."

It is a journey that so easily might not have been his. Three times David Miliband had the chance to challenge for the party leadership: in 2007 when Mr Blair stood down; in 2008 when he appeared to challenge Mr Brown's leadership in a Guardian article; and earlier this year when Patricia Hewitt and Geoff Hoon launched an abortive coup. Three times he shied away at the last moment. By the time he went for it, his brother, four years his junior, was ready to join the ranks of David Cameron and Nick Clegg – with whom he joined the Commons – as the more youthful outsider who overtakes the early favourite.

Shaking off his closeness to Mr Brown's election defeat – and his part in writing the party's manifesto – Ed's success can in part be credited to his celebrated ability to "speak human", which for all his poise and experience, his brother was never quite able to match. In the relative comfort of the battle to become leader, Ed has rarely come under pressure. Brotherly love prevented the "gloves coming off", despite what some headlines said.

Yet the battle with the coalition began in earnest last night, with the Tories issuing an immediate challenge for him to "own up to his role in creating the mess that Britain is in and tell us what he'd do to fix it". No 10 sources stressed that there were "no whoops of delight" at the junior Miliband's victory, despite earlier reports that it was David they most feared. "There is not an air of complacency from the PM at all."

The Conservative Party chairman, Baroness Warsi, also gave a flavour of the likely attack strategy for the coming months, noting: "Ed Miliband wasn't the choice of his MPs, wasn't the choice of Labour Party members, but was put into power by union votes. This looks like a great leap backwards for the Labour Party."

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Delhi faces a desperate 48 hours to save its Commonwealth Games after angry teams denounced the athletes' village as "unfit for human habitation" and a bridge collapsed at the main stadium, injuring 23 construction workers.

With the first athletes set to arrive in India on Friday, the future of the Games was in the balance last night. Teams will meet today to discuss their participation, with some seriously considering withdrawing.

Top athletes continued an exodus yesterday. Those to pull out included Britain’s Olympic 400m hurdle champion Christine Ohuruogu and Lisa Dobriskey. The world and European triple jump champion Phillips Idowu was considering quitting the England team, said to be reluctant to travel to India because of the uncertainty. His manager, Ricky Sims, said: “He is considering his position and is taking a few days to think about it.”

The Games are scheduled to begin in 12 days time and have been dogged by security concerns, construction problems, a dengue epidemic, filthy accommodation and the withdrawal of a succession of star names, most notably the world’s fastest man, Usain Bolt.

The developments are a growing embarrassment for India, which hoped to use the competition as a showcase for the country.

There is a suggestion from team bosses that once one country withdraws then others will quickly follow, leading to a drastically reduced Games or, in the worst-case scenario, the cancellation of the sub-continent’s largest ever sporting event.

Officials from the 71 competing nations are gathering in Delhi over the next couple of days, demanding assurances that the various complaints will somehow be addressed in time – with the veiled threat that they will otherwise cancel their athletes’ flights.

In a day of farce – an Indian government minister dismissed the collapse of the bridge as a “minor hiccup” – England, Scotland, New Zealand and Canada, condemned conditions at the athletes’ village and said that their athletes and officials would have to be accommodated in hotels until the apartment blocks were brought up to scratch, raising fresh security concerns.

Reports said around half the athletes’ apartments were dirty and unfinished, and that workers had even defecated on the floor of some of the buildings. One official with the Commonwealth Games Federation told The Independent that labourers had been living on site for months: “The rooms are unacceptably dirty.”

Some of the harshest condemnation came from Team Scotland with officials deriding the accommodation as “unsafe and unfit for human habitation”. Among the evidence apparently submitted by the Scottish delegation is a photograph of a dog defecating on a bed in the athletes’ village.

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Liberal Democrat demands for gay marriage to be legalised opened up a fresh rift with the party's Tory coalition partners last night.

Activists overwhelmingly called for same-sex couples to win the same right to a church wedding as heterosexuals, arguing that it was an essential step towards full equality of treatment for gay men and women.

Supporters of the move argued that civil partnerships, which were introduced in Britain five years ago, fall short of marriage as gay couples are barred from a full religious ceremony.

They also said that civil partnerships, which can only be carried out by specially-appointed registrars, often do not carry the same pension rights as marriages.

But parity of treatment will be strongly resisted by socially conservative Tories who believe that it would undermine the institution of marriage.

Although David Cameron is a strong supporter of civil partnerships, he refused before the election to give his support to converting them into marriages.

Lynne Featherstone, the Liberal Democrat Equalities minister, promised after the conference vote in Liverpool that the Government would "listen very carefully" to the party's demands for gay marriage to be legalised.

She said: "I am proud of the Liberal Democrats overwhelmingly supporting this motion. It underlines our fundamental commitment to equality and fairness. I hear the growing call for same-sex marriage."

The motion passed by the party would also open up civil partnerships to mixed-sex couples – a move that some critics say would be impractical because of the huge expense of giving previously co-habiting couples extra financial rights.

The Liberal Democrats called for priests, as well as other religious figures, to be allowed to conduct marriage ceremonies in places of worship.

Their motion would allow people who change sex to remain in their marriage and for gay couples married outside Britain to have their status automatically recognised in this country.

Brian Paddick, the former deputy assistant commissioner in the Metropolitan Police, who stood for the Liberal Democrats in the 2008 London Mayor contest, told the conference he married in Norway – but was regarded as unmarried in British law.

Stephen Gilbert, the MP for St Austell and Newquay, said current legislation "degrades same-sex couples to a second-tier partnership". The former MP Evan Harris said the vote would give Liberal Democrats in Government, including Ms Featherstone, the right to press for a change in the law. Dr Harris said there had been a "remarkable transformation" in the Conservative Party, but added: "We need to test that new Tory commitment to equality and this is one of the areas where we can help Lynne do that.

"We should seize the moment to push the agenda forward on full equality. There's plenty of work still to do."

Fred Dunford, from Meon Valley, Hampshire, was one of a handful of activists to oppose the move, arguing it would cost the party votes on the doorstep. "Civil partnerships give enough legal protection and in tax and inheritance rights. I do not believe that we should go as far as marriage."

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Barack Obama came to power promising to get America out of Iraq, a war he alone opposed in the US Senate. But he recognised Afghanistan would be more complicated. He could not just walk away.

The new president was determined to ensure the US was not drawn into an interminable, Vietnam-style conflict – one he fully understood would quickly become known as Obama's war.

In his book Obama's Wars, Bob Woodward lays bare the president's decision to get out of Afghanistan while appearing to be fighting on. It was a policy that met with opposition from the military and led to bitter infighting between the security establishment and top White House political strategists, while Obama also grappled with an unreliable ally in the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai. Then there was what the US president would call "the cancer in Pakistan".

What emerges from admittedly selective extracts published in Woodward's newspaper, the Washington Post, is a picture of a deeply divided administration, at times appearing to be at war with itself, and of a president who is sometimes as scheming as those who opposed him.

The only thing they appear to have in common is a quiet acknowledgement that the war in Afghanistan can never be won. Woodward describes Obama around the time of the 2008 presidential election grasping some of the realities of Afghanistan: "I've been worried about losing this election," the future president tells an adviser. "After talking to you guys, I'm worried about winning this election."

Later the president will say: "We were dealt a very bad hand." It proved to be truer than he realised.

From the day he took power, Obama recognised that the US public's stomach for the fight in Afghanistan would not last. "I have two years with the public on this," he told his advisers, according to the book. "I want an exit strategy."

Later, he would tell aides: "This needs to be a plan about how we're going to hand it off and get out of Afghanistan … everything we're doing has to be focused on how we're going to get to the point where we can reduce our footprint."

The team assembled to make that happen – national security advisers, generals, political strategists and the vice-president, Joe Biden – could all agree on the goal: contain the Taliban, neutralise the threat from al-Qaida and get the troops home.

But beyond that there was little agreement and, as Woodward describes, hammering out a strategy over nearly a year led to infighting, dissent, underhand tactics and insubordination. Obama was prepared to consider the demand from the then commander in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, for more troops – but he wanted an exit plan with it. Woodward says the president grew frustrated with the military for not providing one.

He describes the president waving a memo from the budget office which put the cost of fighting in Afghanistan for the next 10 years at $889bn. "I'm not doing long-term nation building. I am not spending a trillion dollars," Obama told his secretary of state, Hillary Clinton.

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First came 'easyCouncil', a plan by Barnet, in north London, to model local authority services on the no-frills approach of budget airlines. Now Suffolk county council is taking an even more radical approach to public sector reform by proposing a "virtual" authority that outsources all but a handful of its services.

The Tory-controlled county's "new strategic direction", set for approval tomorrow, could see virtually every service outsourced to social enterprises or companies. The aim is to turn the authority from one which provides public services itself, to an "enabling" council, which only commissions them. The council hopes offloading services could shave 30% off its £1.1bn budget, as part of the government's drive to reduce the fiscal deficit.

Although councils have outsourced chunks of their services before, these proposals are regarded by experts as the first time a local authority has considered not directly providing any services at all.

Services would be offloaded in stages. While some "early adopter" services could be outsourced as early as this autumn, the rest would be divested in three phases from April 2011. Libraries, youth clubs, highway services, independent living centres, careers advice, children's centres, registrars, country parks and a records office are among the first services that could be divested.

Ultimately only a few hundred people could remain directly employed by the council, primarily in contract management. At present, the council employs around 27,000 people, 15,000 of whom work in education, which is set to be taken away from local authority control as the government converts schools to academies and free schools. Many of the remaining 12,000 could face either redundancy or be transferred to a social enterprise or the private sector.

The council says it wants to withdraw from directly providing public services in order to reduce the local authority's "size, cost and bureaucracy and build community capacity to enable Suffolk citizens to take greater control of their lives."

"The amount of money we are going to have to spend on providing services will fall dramatically over the next few years," council leader Jeremy Pembroke told the East Anglian Daily Times. "If we don't reform the way we deliver those services then the cuts would have to be much deeper - much more painful. By becoming an enabling authority we will give local people the opportunity to decide what level of service they want."

But unions warn thousands of jobs are at risk. "We are led to believe that the council could end up only employing 200 to 500 people at the end of this process", said Helen Muddock, branch secretary of the Suffolk branch of Unison. "We are talking about having a local authority where the only people employed directly will be dealing with contracts."

Children's services, including child protection, will not be exempted from the strategy, councillors warned. "I think virtually everything is up for outsourcing," said Sandy Martin, leader of the Labour group on the council.

Craig Dearden-Phillips, Liberal Democrat spokesman on communities at the council, questioned to what extent it could cease providing services itself. "A lot depends on to what extent they are prepared to divest the whole children's services apparatus, including child protection, which is wholly inhouse," he said.

The council has already started slimming down its workforce. Sixty-five creche workers were made redundant at the end of August, and in the autumn the council will be voting on separate proposals to privatise 16 care homes.

Dearden-Phillips said that while he offered "qualified support" for the strategy, he had concerns about how it would work in practice. "This needs to be done with inordinate care, in a non-cavalier fashion, involving the workforce and the third sector," he said. "The community is not going to engage if companies like Serco are looking after children at risk."

The move also raises fears about the quality and extent of services in poorer areas. "There are areas in Ipswich and Lowestoft that are among the 10% most deprived areas of the country. In these areas things like libraries and children's centres will fall by the wayside because there won't be the ability to attract the voluntary help," said Martin.

drive from www.guaridan.co.uk

Peter Mandelson has waded into the Labour leadership contest by criticising Ed Miliband for producing a "crowd-pleasing Guardianista" general election manifesto that was ignored by most voters.

In his most direct attack on the younger Miliband brother, the former business secretary mocked him for distancing himself from a work he produced.

"Nobody else authored the manifesto," Mandelson told Radio 4. "It was done by Gordon and Ed."

The ex-business secretary said the manifesto was designed to appeal to readers of the Guardian and "offered nothing to people worried about immigration, housing and welfare scroungers".

He described the document as "a lowest common denominator manifesto, a crowd-pleasing Guardianista manifesto that completely passed by that vast swath of the population who weren't natural Labour voters".

The remarks by Mandelson – who last month warned that Ed Miliband would lead Labour up an "electoral cul-de-sac" – reflect the views of Tony Blair, who believes the shadow energy and climate change secretary has no instinctive feel for middle England.

Blair is reported to have remarked that Ed Miliband would be a "disaster" for Labour.

Mandelson and Blair believe he wants to resort to the Labour "comfort zone" on the left by reaching out to the 1.5 million people who have switched to the Liberal Democrats since 1997.

Supporters of Ed Miliband dismissed Mandelson's remarks, saying he was in no position to criticise the manifesto because he ran Labour's election.

An Ed Miliband campaign source said he wanted to "make a clean break from the Blair, Brown, Mandy era because he recognises the scale of change we need to undertake in order to win again".

"Peter Mandelson, who is supporting David Miliband, grossly underestimates the scale of what needs to be done," the source said. "He is wrong if he thinks it is all down to the manifesto."

Labour party members have two days left to vote in the leadership contest before the ballot closes on Wednesday evening. The winner will be announced on the eve of the Labour conference on Saturday.

drive from www.guardian.co.uk

Nick Clegg has declared that there is "no future" for the Liberal Democrats as a left-wing alternative to Labour as he appealed to his party to show "patience" and maintain a united front with the Conservatives.

In an interview with The Independent on the eve of Liberal Democrat conference starting today, he promised his party it would reap the electoral rewards if it held its nerve about its slump in the opinion polls.

He said: "There were some people, particularly around the height of the Iraq war, who gave up on the Labour Party and turned to the Liberal Democrats as a sort of left-wing conscience of the Labour Party.

"I totally understand that some of these people are not happy with what the Lib Dems are doing in coalition with the Conservatives. The Lib Dems never were and aren't a receptacle for left-wing dissatisfaction with the Labour Party. There is no future for that; there never was."

His comments suggest Mr Clegg is resigned to losing a section of his party's support after departing from the strategy of Charles Kennedy, who opposed the Iraq war. An Ipsos MORI poll this week showed Labour and the Tories neck and neck on 37 per cent with Liberal Democrats on 15 per cent, down from the 23 per cent they won at the May election. Some 32,000 people have joined Labour since May, including 10,000 who formerly supported the Liberal Democrats. Although 600 members have quit Mr Clegg's party, another 4,500 have joined.

In his keynote speech to the Liverpool conference on Monday, Mr Clegg will try to reassure his internal critics that he has not become a remote technocrat or lost sight of their concerns since joining the Coalition with the Tories.

He said: "When you go into government, particularly in such a dramatic way, you get a bunch of Liberal Democrats who walk through the door of Whitehall and the rest of the party does not necessarily walk through the door with you.

"So this [conference] is an incredibly important opportunity for those Liberal Democrats who are in government to show people in the party that they retain the same values, instincts and ambitions – that walking through the door of power does not mean you lose your soul."

Admitting the looming spending cuts were overshadowing the Government's other work, the Deputy Prime Minister said: "If anything, we are doing the most difficult things now, partly because everything is so obscured by the bad, worrying news about deficit reduction. Rather than it getting worse, maybe over time – after very, very difficult decisions on public spending – the wider purpose and vocation of the Government will become more obvious."

He pledged that one of the most radical programmes of any government for a "long, long time" would achieve more on political reform, civil liberties and protecting pensioners than Labour did in 13 years, combined with "an impeccably Liberal approach" to the NHS, education and welfare reform. "This is not some arbitrary menu of rushed proposals cobbled together. They reflect, right across the piece, big, long-standing Liberal aspirations," he said.

Acknowledging the need to sell the reforms, Mr Clegg said: "Both for the Lib Dems as a party and for the country, we need to be more explicit about what a radical, reforming government this is going to be. The worst thing would have been to go into government and be an insipid adornment to the establishment way of doing things."

However, some government policies may come under fire at the Liverpool conference. Some Liberal Democrats are worried that the Government's "free schools" dilute the role of local authorities; that the party was bounced into accepting Tory health reforms and that a proposed benefits shake-up will harm vulnerable people.

Yesterday, the Liberal Democrat leader insisted his party is "much calmer, more united and level-headed" than portrayed in the media.

Admitting the conference took place at a difficult moment, he said: "Public anxiety about the Comprehensive Spending Review is now at its height. We are at the very worst point in the cycle. It is the worst of all worlds. There is acute uncertainty about the unknown and we have not yet been able to put people out of their misery by explaining what is going to happen. That vacuum gets filled by an immense amount of fear and, in some cases, outlandish scaremongering.

"I certainly didn't go into politics to make cuts. I really hope that come the next election in five years, we will not be defined by cuts alone.

"People will look back on the deficit reduction plan and realise it was necessary to get the economy going and they will see a wider picture – a new kind of politics after the expenses scandal; greater fairness in our schools; a more accountable health service and restored civil liberties." He promised that radical policies on the environment were "in the engine room" and would be "in the shop window" before Christmas.

Pleading with his party to keep the polls "in perspective", Mr Clegg said: "All governments have phases. The problem is the 24/7 media culture. The danger is that everyone loses the patience required to allow governments to do big, good things. They don't happen overnight.

drive from www.independent.co.uk