It was Nick Clegg's birthday on Tuesday and it sounded like the onset of a midlife crisis. Forty-seven and in a dead end job with no end in sight unless Labour gets its act together.
Not on a zero-hours contract, not yet, but his future befogged in uncertainty.
Locked in a loveless marriage with the Tories too, no wonder he sounded even glummer than usual.
Worse, the day just happened to coincide with the deputy PM's question time. Who says the Commons authorities are a humourless bunch, eh?
"Birthday greetings," said fellow Lib Dem, the chirpy Bob Russell, halfway through the session. It was well meant, but Sir Bob spoiled the effect by asking for "a progress report on the triple lock for pensions".
Who cares about pensions when you are 47 and going to have to work until 75 to trim George Osborne's deficit? Besides, as MPs know, the triple lock is coalition dynamite. Osborne and IDS want to ravish pensioner incomes to be fair to the already ravished majority.
Seated behind him Tory backbenchers, eager for some red meat after all that Christmas turkey, were starting to bite the birthday boy.
Clegg was on a hiding to nothing. He knew it. Poor Nick. Barely two weeks ago he was probably basking on an Andalusian beach, necking white rioja with his wife's paella and Brussels sprouts.
"On my birthday I look forward to nothing more than coming to DPM's questions," he replied. Some politicians could have got a laugh out of that admission, rueful but funny.
Not Clegg. In his glum Eeyore-ish way he sounded genuinely sorry for himself. Some 47-year-olds buy a red sports car or a Harley-Davidson. Nick gets pension questions.
What a contrast to his predecessors! Ever-confident Paddy Ashdown usually managed to sound like Disney's SAS version of AA Milne's Tigger ("bouncing is what Tiggers do best") toting an Uzi, while Charles Kennedy was one of nature's Piglets, boosting his courage with another single malt.
It had not been an easy session. Greg Clark, Clegg's hopelessly nice deputy (he ruined his career by praising Polly Toynbee), had been tormented by MPs over individual voter registration. Labour MPs suspect it is a plot to stop voters voting; some Tories merely hope it is.
Clark was also roughed up over the coalition's habit of stuffing the unreformed Lords with expensive new peers. Every worm finally turns. You did it first, the ministerial invertebrate replied.
"Why is the deputy prime minister not answering this question?" interjected Tory grandee Sir Peter Tapsell. Sir Peter normally speaks only to God or (in His absence) to David Cameron, but could not resist a chance to remind MPs that Lords reform is another of the birthday boy's doomed projects.
Forty-seven and not a reformed bicameral legislature to his name! No wonder he misses the beach.
Bullied over social mobility, Clegg decided to indulge himself. Hey, you're only 47 once! If you can't buy a Harley you can at least flaunt the coalition's mobility reforms. Vroom, vroom.
"It is a counsel of pessimism somehow to assume that people's life chances are blighted at birth," he added. It certainly was not his own experience.
Later Clegg was attacked over crowding in hospital A&E wards. Nonsense, replied Clegg, by now quite combative, we are treating thousands more patients than under Labour. Vroom, vroom.
This was a bit like saying that Syrian refugee camps in Turkey and Lebanon are so much more successful this Christmas than last.
It brought the scornful wrath of Labour's Sadiq Khan down on his head. "Stafford hospital," replied Clegg, whose Lib Dem mean gene had finally kicked in.
Taxed about the stalled Heseltine plan for devolving power from Whitehall, he brazenly claimed that Lord Heseltine's "fundamental insight" was that Whitehall did not always know best. This was nonsense. Hezza's fundamental insight has always been that, wherever he happens to be, Hezza knows best. He is one of nature's Harley-Davidson types.
When someone asked who would be Britain's next EU commissioner, Labour's Angela Eagle tried to put the DPM out of his misery. "Nick Clegg," she shouted. But by then the birthday boy had left on his imaginary Harley-Davidson scooter.
• This article was amended on 8 January 2014. The original article said Nick Clegg was 46. He is actually 47.
