MY admiration for David Cameron as a canny political leader has grown after last week’s incendiary vote to hike university fees to £9,000 a year.

After all, who else could get away with such a brutal mugging of generations of future students and walk away without a scratch?

Instead, all the injuries are on what appears to be the walking corpse of Nick Clegg, the prime minister’s lightning rod, human shield or – as Lee Harvey Oswald might put it – his patsy.

I suspect the Liberal Democrat leader will forever be tarred with the stain of his fees betrayal – just as Tony Blair will never escape the “Bliar” label so correctly branded over Iraq.

In fact, it’s worse.

Many people hated the former Labour prime minister, but he was never ridiculed in the way Mr Clegg is now, by cartoonists and on TV shows such as Have I Got News For You.

Almost daily, the deputy prime minister and fellow Lib Dems Vince Cable and Danny Alexander take a pummeling as they defend government policy – while senior Tories are nowhere to be seen.

It is a quite brilliant political strategy and one that could easily carry the Conservatives through to an outright General Election victory in 2015.

Mr Cameron would have ridden into Downing Street with a healthy majority in May, but for Lib Dem strength in the South and South West – aided by tactical voting by Labour supporters.

You can be certain those votes will not be lent to the Lib Dems next time round, given Mr Clegg’s lurch to the right. Paradoxically, that can only deliver more Conservative MPs.

The mystery is why the Lib Dems put up with the implosion of their party to force through Tory policies?

Or, more interestingly, for how much longer they will?

Let’s be clear, Mr Clegg had a clear escape route over £9,000 student fees – the mindblowing 80 per cent cut in teaching grants that make them necessary – yet chose to fall in with his Coalition partner.

Now, for the first time, the survival of the Con-Lib pact through to 2015 is in doubt, after half of Lib Dem MPs deserted their leader and the party plunged new depths in the polls.

The only way the Coalition will break apart is if the elastic between Lib Dem rightwingers – such as Mr Clegg – and the party’s majority of social democrats stretches so far that it snaps. A leadership challenge would follow.

Last week’s revolt over student fees made that more likely.

ANNOUNCING those council cuts this week, Eric Pickles said he was protecting “the most vulnerable communities” – yet, as I revealed, parts of the North-East will be hit 14 times as hard as rich parts of the South.

So, Hartlepool and Middlesbrough will lose the maximum next year – 8.9 per cent of their “spending power” – while the likes of Surrey (down 0.31 per cent) and Buckinghamshire (down 0.6 per cent) escape the pain.

Even those figures don’t tell the full story, because the cuts in Government grants are much bigger in the worst-hit areas, as much as 17 per cent.

I urge you to study the small print very closely whenever the Communities Secretary is at the despatch box.