The claim
“I got a letter a few months ago from an elderly couple who said to me they now find it so difficult to heat their homes on cold winter days that on those cold winter days they get into a bus in their town and travel round the bus just to stay warm.”
Nick Clegg, Leaders’ debate, 22 April 2010

The background
After the fiasco last week over David Cameron’s “40-year-old black man” and his souped-up Lexus, I was on the look out last night for suspicious-sounding anecdotes and encounters with voters. So when Nick Clegg recounted his tale of pensioners who take a bus simply to keep warm, my interest was piqued.

The analysis
To back up his claim, the Liberal Democrats have now shown me the letter in question. It comes from a 63 year old man who does indeed say he and his wife “sometimes use our free pass to ride around on the buses to keep warm”.

In fact, what he goes on to say is, if anything, even more striking. He and his wife are so badly off, he writes, that “food is fast becoming a luxury”.

His private pension has, he says, “been slowly eroding away under the Labour government” and the scrapping of the 10p income tax rate “has left me another £2.60 a week worse off”.

As a result, he claims he and his wife “are fast moving into a state of poverty”. They’ve “spent the winter wrapped in a dozen layers of clothing in order to try to keep warm, only daring to put the heating on for half an hour in the morning and half an hour in the evening”.

The verdict
So clearly the Lib Dem leader could have quoted far more extensively from the letter than he did. And the anecdote he did pick out was factually accurate.

In order to preserve their anonymity, I have not used the pensioners’ names or printed the letter in full.