Today I did something I don’t often do, and for reasons I won’t bore you with, bought the Daily Telegraph. And flicking through it searching for what I was looking for, I was delighted to find a large photograph and interview with Mr Clegg taking up most of one of its pages.

It’s generally a positive interview and the journalist, Rachel Sylvester, runs through with Nick his views on quite a wide range of major policy issues, from tax levels to drugs reclassification and employment rights. Personally I was particularly pleased to see him going strong again on what for me is the central liberal theme of putting people in control of their own lives, as well as, strikingly, going particularly heavily on the importance of giving local councils real power to act, including to tax.

But the greater significance of the interview, it seems to me, is that the Telegraph ran it at all. It would be fair to say, I think, that most Telegraph readers do not vote Liberal Democrat. The latest update from the front in the Lib Dem leadership contest would not normally be, I would guess, near the top of the list of interests of most of them.

But yet someone had now decided that the Daily Telegraph should run a major interview with one of the candidates - and it seems to me that this kind of interest is crucial for the kind of breakthrough for the party that the leadership contest is throwing up talk of. Clearly if we want to make strides forward then we need to win votes from people who have not generally voted for us in the past.

And rightly or wrongly, the ability to draw the interest of journalists and others beyond the normal reach of the Liberal Democrats, is one of the elements which will contribute to us making that breakthrough under a new leader.

This is none the less true for Ms Sylvester’s slightly loose grasp of one of the policies that they were discussing. Contrary to what she said, Nick has not endorsed education vouchers. The idea that he has promoted is in fact the ‘pupil premium’. This would provide additional resources to children in greater need, but this wouldn’t be done by asking the parent to take a voucher to the school, as Ms Sylvester has assumed, but by the premium going directly to the schools where it is needed.

Nonetheless it was great to see the Telegraph showing some interest in our party and one of its future leaders. When I worked as volunteer in the party’s press office more than ten years ago, we used to get letters in Lib Dem News saying that they thought the party should try to get more coverage in the media - as if this were a helpful new idea and nobody was actually already trying to do that. We were, and the party still is.

But the sad truth is that, rightly or wrongly, for the party to get more coverage the media have to be interested, for their own reasons, in covering us. Among its other aspects too, the decision we make over the next few weeks crucially needs to help us to do that.