First of all, well done. We, your supporters, think you did a great job exposing the Tories’ plans which will harm the economic recovery and put public services at risk. You came across as sincere and as someone who really knows what he’s doing – just as we knew you would, because that is who you are.

But now to round two. While we understand the tactic of wanting to isolate Cameron in the political arena and make him look the fool he is, it is now time also to highlight the differences between us and the Lib Dems – albeit very carefully, due to Clegg’s newfound popularity.

We want you to be much stronger in defending our Child Trust Funds, which is protected money for children that cannot be spent by parents on whatever they like, and which means that all children, whatever their background, can have savings for their future.

And we want you to defend the Winter Fuel Allowance and free bus passes for older people – these have come to be valued by millions.

And we want you to challenge the fairness of increasing the bottom rate of income tax to £10k, which results in everyone, including millionaires, not having to pay tax on the first £10k they earn. Lib Dem tax plans are not targeted to mean that the better off are taxed more – as they used to be under Charles Kennedy, who was much more of a progressive than Clegg.

And we want you to argue against an arbitrary £400 limit on pay increases in the public sector, when surely any pay freezes that do take place should mean that those at the top of the income pile gain the least, but those at the bottom can still improve year on year. Why should both a headteacher and a teaching assistant get up to a £400 pay rise, when one earns around £75k and another earns around £12k? Again, this is not targeted and not fair.

And we want you to expose what Lib Dem (as well as Tory) cuts will mean for areas such as children’s social care, training of health professionals such as radiographers and speech therapists (why do politicians think there are only doctors, nurses and managers working in the health service?), and for funding of victim-support projects, such as those working with victims of domestic violence.

And if you really believe that we must keep Trident, then you have to explain why. Yes, we want to live in a nuclear-free world, and you said that we believe in multilateral disarmament – that is of course the great vision. But you need to ask the public: do we know what the world will be like in 20-30 years time? Do we want to be in a position of having to rely on the USA or other NATO countries to defend us? What would happen if all NATO countries decided they couldn’t afford nuclear weapons anymore? Can we say, sadly, that the world will ever be truly nuclear-free, because even if all nation states disarmed, how would we know that terrorist organisations for example were not developing them?

Lastly, we want you to take away Clegg’s notion of being completely fresh and new, and never having been in government before, by exposing what so many Lib Dem Councils (or hung Councils with coalitions involving Lib Dems) have done up and down the country. We want you to expose the fact that, of the three party leaders, Clegg least represents the views and actions of the rest of his party because it is made up primarily of local activists, often focussed on single issues, with no unifying ideology, and consequently they do different things in different places. I know for sure that our local government colleagues everywhere will be itching to give you stories you can share.

We hope you can take this on board, Gordon. Thank you for reading. We are with you all the way.