Today is a day when students are willing to stand about in the cold and call Nick Clegg and the Libdems liars because of pre-election pledges over tuition fees. There were even people willing to say on LBC Radio today that some kind of fraud has been committed here and that various Libdem MPs who signed a pledge with no intention to carry it out should be prosecuted for it.

Feelings are clearly running high. Even those well-known truth-telling democrats, the Iranians, are covering the story where it relates to the anger of the students:

It seems a long time since Nick Clegg was the blue-eyed boy standing in Walthamstow at one of his pre-election 'Town Hall Meetings'. I still remember him, in front of the audience in Mission Grove School, ostensibly of local prospective voters, and apparently answering the questions of all comers in a skillful, straight and honest manner in a bid to get elected.

Now I wonder if even that meeting was all that it seemed. Yes, there were a number of locals in the audience, but some of the faces have never been seen locally since. The Star, a South Yorkshire newspaper, is today reporting that the Liberal Democrats have admitted to paying people to attend similar meetings in other parts of the country.

The Lib Dems have told the Electoral Commission that they paid Full House Audience Management £7,600 to find audiences for four meetings at which Nick Clegg spoke between April 10 and May 4 in Gateshead, Glasgow, Redcar in Cleveland and Richmond in London.

The party paid another £1,000 for the company to find an audience for Mr Clegg's 50th town hall meeting at a school in Dorset. The invoice had originally been £2,000 but it was reduced by half "due to short notice and poor response".

A Lib Dem spokesman is reported to have said: "When Nick did town hall meetings we paid an independent firm to recruit the audience for us. That is the provision of security vetting and political neutrality.

"Rather than just have members, we thought we would open it up to other people. To do that we employed an audience-finding company".

What we do not know is what payments, if any, were made in respect of any of the hundred or so people at the meeting which took place in July 2009 at the Mission Grove Primary School. Because the LibDems are now in such disarray locally and also because this meeting took place a considerable period before the election was announced, I doubt if we will ever find out.