Clegg joins Cameron talking cock

Occasionally a politician makes a remark which brings their character into sharp focus.

Ed Miliband did it recently in front of an audience of businessmen.

Question from floor on green policies. Miliband shows he's in listening mode by asking delegate about his views on green. But his tactics backfire horribly on the next question: 'you've never been in business, how are you qualified to know what small businesses need?'

Miliband says 'good question' but immediately seeks to take another one at the same time: delegates reckon he's trying to buy time and jeer until he agrees to get on with it.

'I don't claim to be a business person but my grandfather was,' he says. 'He died before I was born but I heard a lot about him from my father.'

Just for clarity, that would be Ed Miliband's Marxist professor father.

Cameron notoriously said:

I saw figures the other day that showed that only one black person went to Oxford last year. I think that is disgraceful. We have got to do better than that.

Of course, he was wrong.

Senior officials at the university described the figure as "highly misleading" as it related only to British students who described themselves as black Caribbean. They said Oxford admitted another 27 students who described themselves as black African and another 14 who were mixed race.

The university also said that only 452 black students across the country had even achieved the A-level results demanded by Oxford to meet its minimum entry requirements for the 2009-10 academic year.

And black students apply in disproportionately high numbers for the most heavily oversubscribed courses, such as medicine, making it less likely that they will win places.

Graham Stuart, the Conservative chairman of the Commons education select committee, is right on the button:

The problem we have with various minority groups in this country who don't get into the best universities is that they don't receive a sufficiently good education in the first place.

You don't solve that by forcing institutions with high standards to lower their intakes, you deal with it by improving the standards of state education for all. That's the betrayal and the scandal here – we don't provide good enough education in our schools.

We let down the poorest and those from ethnic minorities and that's what we have got to put right, not blame Oxford for the situation we've got ourselves into.

An Oxford don says, "I thought it was an extraordinarily misguided comment. It seems to be based on zero understanding of what’s actually happening in the real world."

Of students starting in 2009-10 who chose to state their ethnicity, almost a quarter of students were from ethnic minority backgrounds but 1.5% were black.

In Oxford, individual colleges choose their own students. Is Cameron saying that all Oxford colleges, right across the board, discriminate against black Caribbean students but not against other ethnic minorities? Just a second's thought would show how implausible that is.

Clegg has chosen to join Cameron in talking this cock. Whinge, whinge, blame everyone but yourselves.

Cameron also claimed that Britain was responsible for many of the world's historic problems, including the conflict in Kashmir between India and Pakistan, a display of ignorance that would disgrace even a journalist. Here, please take loads of money.

And today he's going to pledge to cut the numbers entering Britain to tens of thousands, rather than hundreds of thousands. Of course the trailer for his speech doesn't mention the EU, where we can't control numbers.

Some argue that we need highly skilled immigrants because our state education is below par.

Isn't this where we came in? But doubtless we will just be served more tripe.

Meanwhile Cameron and his ilk continue to talk cock, spouting their ill-informed prejudices and sticking plaster solutions. Good government is harder work than that.