Working people will have had to suspend their disbelief yesterday when Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg called on the Tory Party to “come clean” over the impact of planned cuts to public services.

The lonely Lib Dem leader has spent recent weeks desperately trying to distance himself from the government he joined in 2010.

He is no longer to be found at David Cameron’s side at the weekly Prime Minister’s questions slugfest, grinning idiotically as the massed ranks of braying Tory goons egg on their scarlet-faced pimpernel.

He did not even show up to the Chancellor’s latest Autumn Statement, presumably in the hope that millions of workers struggling to keep their heads above water after years of shrinking pay packets and slashed social security will forget his party’s criminal collaboration with George Osborne’s axe-mad antics.

In the run-up to next May’s election Clegg will seek to claim credit for a “recovery” that leaves people far poorer than they were four years ago while insisting, as he did at his party’s last conference, that the Lib Dems have somehow “moderated” the economic sabotage unleashed on this country by the Conservatives.

But it is he who needs to come clean. All this government’s most damaging policies have received full-throated support from the Lib Dems.

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Famously, they backed a staggering rise in the cost of going to university by charging students up to £9,000 a year despite a “read my lips” pledge that they would not support any fee increase even in a coalition government.

But their other acts of treachery have been no less contemptible. The Lib Dems threw their weight behind Andrew Lansley’s Health and Social Care Act, which opened our NHS to exploitation by money-grubbing private firms.

Their supposedly left-leaning number two Vince Cable played the leading role in forcing through the Royal Mail sell-off despite overwhelming public opposition and managed to short-change the British people by more than a billion pounds to boot.

They back the hated bedroom tax forcing tenants into penury across the country and the shameful “fit for work” tests imposed on the disabled by Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith.

A reputation for being less trigger-happy than the two big parties on foreign policy, gained through opposing the illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003, has been squandered by enthusiastic backing for bombing Libya back to the stone age in 2011 and enthusiastic support for the far-right seizure of power in Ukraine earlier this year.

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Even at the tail-end of this disastrous Parliament, facing electoral oblivion at the polls, they did not lift a finger to stop the Tories handing the profitable publicly run East Coast Main Line rail franchise over to the private sector.

So Clegg’s belated discovery of a conscience should be taken with a pinch of salt. He has had plenty of opportunities to deprive the government of its majority at key stages of the destruction of our welfare state. He has taken none of them.

We will not forget. The Liberal Democrats have exposed themselves as neoliberal free-market fanatics no less callous than their Conservative bedfellows.

Only the election of a Labour government — with strong pressure from the labour movement to stand up for its natural supporters and reverse the huge transfer of wealth from the many to the few that austerity represents — offers a chance for this country to get back on track.

No-one should fall for the Orange Book boys’ plea that a tactical vote for them will keep out the Tories again. A vote for the Lib Dems in May is a vote for austerity and war.