The right-wing, Tory press this morning is filled with horrible, personal attacks on Nick Clegg, much of them dishonest and spurious. Surprise, surprise!

The Daily Mail goes above and beyond the call of duty with its "Nazi slur [2]" nonsense. To be fair, Tory bloggers like Iain Dale [3] have condemned this bilious and poisonous coverage.

But here's what interested me. This is the offending paragraph from the piece [4] that Nick Clegg wrote for the Guardian back in 2002, when he was an MEP, which the Mail chose to focus on:

All nations have a cross to bear, and none more so than Germany with its memories of Nazism. But the British cross is more insidious still. A misplaced sense of superiority, sustained by delusions of grandeur and a tenacious obsession with the last war, is much harder to shake off. I wish Mr Puhle and Mr Sawartzki well. We need to be put back in our place.

Hmm. He's basically saying Great Britain is not great anymore and we're not as grand or good as we used to be. But that sounds to me like the normal Daily Mail editorial line - "broken Britain", "national decline", blah blah blah.

So what's the problem?