Nick Clegg Could Be Prime Minister For Month After …… Says Lib Dem Sir Nick Harvey, Huffington Post

Nick Clegg could serve as prime minister for a month after the general election until a new coalition is formed, a senior Lib Dem MP has suggested.

Former defence minister Sir Nick Harvey said unlike the 2010 coalition deal which was hammered out in just five days, any negotiations after this May's poll should take much longer.

In an interview with The Huffington Post, Harvey said this would require an "interim government" to be in place while political parties haggled over the formation of a new administration.

Harvey said as the incumbent, David Cameron should remain in Downing Street until a deal was struck. But that if the Conservative leader "was so fucked off" he wanted to leave then there was "no reason" why Clegg could not fill the role - assuming of course the deputy prime minister keeps his seat.

The veteran Lib Dem MP also said it would be "much harder" for the party leadership to convince its members to vote for another coalition and said he would be "certainly willing" to argue in favour of the party staying out of power.

Harvey, who predicted Ed Miliband would wake up on 8 May with the most MPs, also said the Lib Dems could fill half its ministerial positions in a future coalition with members of the House of Lords - if the party sees its number of MPs reduced to around 30.

He was speaking to HufPost following the publication of his book, After the Rose Garden, which examines the mistakes the Lib Dems made during the 2010 negotiations with the Tories.

"I personally think that they should take at least a month," Harvey said when asked how long any negotiations should last. "And I think that what you need during the course of that month is some sort of interim government. Where you've got a prime minister and home secretary and a chancellor. And maybe a deputy prime minister. I don't think it is right to appoint a government of 121 members until such time as you have a deal. If the deal is going to take a month, you could just appoint a government of eight or ten ministers.

Lib Dems: SNP could gain independence by back door by Scott Macnab, The Scotsman Newspaper.

Willie Rennie, Leader of the Scottish Liberal Democrats.

The SNP could still gain “independence by the back door” through an “ultra extreme” form of devolution in a post-election deal, Liberal Democrat leader Willie Rennie will say tonight.

The comments follow warnings by former First Minister Alex Salmond last week that the forthcoming UK election could be used to secure “home rule” for Scotland.

Mr Rennie will claim “the Nationalist campaign continues” in a keynote speech in Edinburgh.

But Nationalists last night dismissed the claims and insisted there is widespread support for Holyrood controlling all areas of government policy except defence and foreign affairs. “Independence can only be decided in a referendum,” said SNP backbench MSP Mark MacDonald.

Mr Rennie will go on the offensive in a lecture at the David Hume Institute this evening in Edinburgh.

“The SNP want independence by the back door,” Mr Rennie will say. “As a minimum they say they want a form of ultra-extreme devolution that doesn’t exist anywhere else in the world and which would inevitably tip Scotland into independence.”

Mr Rennie will accuse Nationalists of “redefining what an election was about” after the votes have been counted.

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