Nick Clegg will be making a mistake if he appoints Danny Alexander as our economic spokesman for 2015

Andrew Grice makes a worrying claim in the Independent:

Nick Clegg is expected to appoint Danny Alexander rather than Vince Cable as the Liberal Democrats' main economic spokesman at next year's general election.

His evidence for this is that Nick Clegg and Danny Alexander have jointly written (or rather, I suspect, put their name to) an article for the Indy setting out the Lib Dems' stance on tax and spending in the 2015-20 parliament.

I do hope that Nick will not appoint Danny as our economic spokesman at the next election. I have not seen a single media or parliamentary performance from Danny that has involved him doing more than shuffle a limited number of prefabricated sentences. It is hard to imagine him doing well in the televised chancellors' debate, for instance.

By contrast, Vince (who performed so capably in that debate in 2010) has the respect of the public and has the priceless ability to take credit for the good things the government has done and give the impression that the bad things are nothing to do with us.

He is also able to command the House of Commons in a way that Danny can only dream of.

This decision would also display a distressing amount of strategic confusion among Team Clegg. We are told - though you would have to work hard to glean this from the Indy article or from Nick's speech on Monday - that the Liberal Democrats are going to fight the next election on a radically different economic from the one George Osborne will put forward.

So why choose the Lib Dem politician who is so closely linked to Osborne in the public mind to put it forward?

At the 2010 election we used to boast that the Lib Dem front bench had four considerable economists, which made a more powerful team than either of the other parties could boast.

Chris Huhne has fallen by the wayside, and David Laws has to an extent too. But if Nick thinks Vince Cable is too old, or he does not trust him or lacks the magnanimity to put the Oakeshott plotting behind him, then let him choose Steve Webb for this role.