 The Prime Minister is well qualified for the job in at least one important sense: he is lucky. He is lucky that Nick Clegg has absorbed most of the opprobrium directed at the coalition in its first year. From some of the press coverage recently, a Rip Van Winkle might rub his eyes and conclude that Mr Clegg was the most evil man in Britain. Yet anyone who has actually been awake during the past 12 months must know that Mr Clegg is trying to promote the values of social justice and toleration for which his party stands. as John Rentoul argues opposite, one may disagree with the way he has gone about it, but one should not doubt his sincerity or seriousness of purpose.  David Cameron has been lucky, too, to face a weak leader of the opposition. Ed Miliband has barely registered with the British electorate. While the Labour Party was right last year and remains right now to argue that public spending should be cut on a shallower trajectory than the Conservative plans, it failed miserably to turn last week's local elections into a referendum on George Osborne's spending cuts. Labour made 800 gains, but they were at the expense of the Liberal Democrats and independents, while the Conservatives actually increased their representation on local councils.  Mr Cameron was lucky that Labour was hopelessly divided over electoral reform, and that Mr Miliband was unable to show leadership on the issue. Mr Cameron was lucky that the fate of the referendum turned partly on how much of the centre-left electorate felt about Mr Clegg. The Prime Minister was also ruthless enough, when the outcome of the referendum seemed in doubt, to mobilise anti-Clegg sentiment when it suited him. and he was lucky, both in the referendum and in everything else, to have most of the press behind him.  He has, of course, been lucky from birth - and he has always been lucky in his ability to cram for an exam at the last moment. at Eton he was an indifferent student until his a-levels; at Oxford he rose to the challenge of a First. as a new MP, he was lucky that David Davis, such a certainty as "next Tory leader" that he had signed up nearly every careerist in the parliamentary party, ran such a poor campaign.  as Paul Goodman, the former MP, pointed out on the Conservative Home website on Friday, he was lucky to become Tory leader when he did, "towards t 